Additional Images

Provenance:

Estate of Doris Shadbolt
Equinox Gallery, Vancouver, BC
Private Collection, British Columbia

Note:

Shadbolt’s riotous explosion of flowers may have its roots in the work of his mother, a dressmaker. The influence of her patterned fabric scraps found their way into several of his works, including Umbilicus, held in the permanent collection of the National Gallery in Ottawa. The work was originally part of the personal collection of the artist’s wife Doris, so one might be forgiven for sentimentally wondering if this work functioned as a painterly bouquet of sorts.

Shadbolt had begun his Winter Garden series in 1961, focusing on furniture and floral arrangements. The artist experimented with still life early in his career, and this return to floral themes can be viewed as an extension of his interest in the natural world, metamorphosis and the cycles of life, currents which underpinned the breadth of his oeuvre. Shadbolt often returned to work he had made earlier, recycling and reinterpreting directions sometimes over a decade old.

A. J. Kristiansen, writing about a 1990 exhibition of Shadbolt’s work, explains that “the constant in Shadbolt's image-making - the thread that binds his works over time, place and style - is the concept of a struggle between two poles of expression. Structure emerges at different moments to dominate, control the flow, only to have the spontaneous erupt forth unfettered at a later moment. The tension between design strictures and organic flux has not only informed the artist's oeuvre but has given impetus to the dynamic of development.”