Harold Town · William Ronald · Jock MacDonald
 Enigma, 1967 mixed media on paper, 25½" × 20" |
 French Postcard Series, 1972 oil pastel on canson paper, 25¾" × 19" |
  Girl with Bicycle (French Postcard), 1971 grease crayon on paper, 27¼" × 32½" |
 Vale Variation #84, 1973 pen, brush & ink, graphite, gouache, and oil pastel on canson, 19¾" × 25½" |
 Vale Variation #99, 1974 gouache, watercolour & collage on paper, 17 1/8" × 30" |
 Vale Variation #235, 1976 coloured crayon on paper, 19½" × 25½" |
 Windshield of Poetry, 1957 oil and lucite on canvas, 27" × 34¼" |
 Stages #38, 1987 mixed media on board, 26½" × 26½" × 3¾" |
 Waiting for the Jolly Green Giant, 1980 oil on canvas, 30" × 40" |
 Toy Horse #148, 1979 mixed media on paper, 29½" × 36½" |
 Toy Horse #325, 1982 mixed media on paper, 18" × 22" |
 Toy Horse #284 mixed media on paper, 23½" × 23½" |
 Toy Horse, 1976 pastel on paper, 25" × 18" |
 Toy Horse #229, 1979 gouache/ink, 22" × 29½" |
 Toy Horse #243 mixed media on paper, 30½" × 30" |
 The Circle Lost, 1959 oil on canvas, 8" × 10" |
 Snap, 1974 mixed media on canvas, 46¾" × 40" |
 Snap #94, 1974 oil on canvas, 60" × 60" |
 God Series #22, 1979 mixed media on paper, 19" × 25" |
 God Series #12, 1979 mixed media on paper, 19" × 25" |
 Untitled, 1955 oil / collage on board, 33¼" × 43¾" |
 King Fence Sentinels #1, 1957 single autographic print on paper, 24" × 30" |
 Snow Palace, 1957 single autographic print, 18"x 24" |
 Untitled (The Dig), 1957-58 single autographic print on paper, A/P, 25" × 30" |
See: Harold Town's Popsters & Celebrities
 Untitled #2, 1992 acrylic on paper, 22" × 30" |
 Untitled #1, 1992 acrylic on paper, 22" × 30" |
 Untitled #3, 1993 acrylic on paper, 22" × 30" |
 Kite Flying, 1948 oil on canvas, 26" × 36" |
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
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 t o 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.
Gallery Gevik Exhibitions
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Harold Town · Willaim Ronald · Jack MacDonald Members of Painters 11 October 16 to November 5, 2010 (image: Kite Flying) |
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Harold Town Paintings and Works on Paper October 4 to October 15, 2008 (images: God Series #22, Enigma, The Windshield of Poetry) |