Painters 11

Painters 11 – Biography

Toronto's Painters Eleven (variant names: Painters 11 or P11) initially met as a group in 1953. Emerging a decade later than the Automatistes, they looked to New York for their immediate inspiration.

Stylistic individuality was always their artistic goal - they never attempted to articulate an aesthetic program. Painters Eleven was a disparate group, its members either quite young, or if they were not, still finding their way artistically, when they began to meet around 1950. They had their first show at the Roberts Gallery in 1954.

Later that same year, William Ronald (1926-1998) had his first one-man show at Hart House. All the while, Ronald was deciding that his future was to be in New York and moved there in 1954. American art critic, Lawrence Campbell wrote in Art News, "[Ronald is] the most sensational of the group," approving his "crude, vital, off-beat, scaffold-constructions, part automatist, part-deliberate". After his New York triumphs, Ronald moved back to Toronto and miraculously showed his new work at the Christopher Cutts Gallery in 2000. The Ronald of the second half of the 1950s had resurfaced uninhibitedly, the old central-image format back in all its painterly exuberance but tested and challenged.

Painters Eleven had a propensity to zero in on areas of dense detail where anything goes: the paint was squeezed, swirled, dribbled, splashed and scraped. The work of Harold Town (1924-1990) captures this expressive style in Oasis. Harold Malcolmson explained Town's procedure:

Town's characteristic method of constructing a canvas is the contrast of opposites. His approach is not to take a single idea and lay it out. Instead Town employs a colour, a shape, or a texture and then introduces its opposite and its opposite and so on. This technique of synthesis, antithesis, and resolution seems to me to account for the fact that a Town canvas often seems a contest, an argument, a clash of opposed wills. Town will introduce a colour so brilliant, so brittle and powerful, that is seemingly must overbalance his picture, then with astonishing virtuosity and dexterity he will introduce some contrasting new elements that magically create a new equilibrium.

— Roald Nasgaard, Abstract Painting in Canada, Douglas & McIntyre Ltd., Vancouver, BC, 2007.