Additional Images

Provenance:

Wallack Galleries, Ottawa
Private Collection, Montreal

Literature:

Margaret Gray, Margaret Rand and Lois Steen, Charles Comfort, Agincourt, Ontario, 1976, page 69 and page 45 for a closely related sketch entitled Peep Hole Tree.

Note:

“Naples yellow, yellow ochre, raw sienna, raw umber, burnt umber… both Alizarin crimson and either vermilion or scarlet vermilion, two blues, cobalt and cerulean… then viridian. That would be how I’d set my palette…”

Comfort’s landscapes are characterized as much by their bold and balanced graphic qualities, as they are by their underlying sensuousness. The artist pares down the work to the barest of forms: straight lines juxtapose warm curves; rocks, trees and clouds ooze with rich colours. His landscapes shine brightest when situated in Haliburton and the Maritimes, but especially in Georgian Bay. As Gray, Rand and Steen write, “Time and again we are made aware of Comfort’s superb sense of colour, harmony and tone - there is unerring beauty, even a voluptuous quality to his best landscapes, especially in the flesh tones of the Georgian Bay rocks.”