Provenance:

Isabelle Erskine, London, Ontario.
By descent to the present owner.

Literature:

Roald Nasgaard, “Abstract Painting in Canada”, Toronto, 2007, page 104.
Gary Michel Dault, “Harold Town” (interview), “Canadian Art”, Spring 1986, pages 44-45.

Note:

1960 brought continued success for Harold Town, a charismatic Toronto artist who had gained early prominence in Painters Eleven. Nasgaard describes Town’s obsession of filling the painting surface, the artist “overcome by a ‘horror vacui’ that drove him to fill every corner and to display in each canvas the whole arsenal of his painter’s techniques.” In “100% Canadian Landscape”, Town unleashes his weaponry. The teeming composition brings together elements which seem to fight for space, overlapping and integrating in the pre-determined manner that Town had truly mastered.

Town’s creative mind made compelling paintings out of his environment.Dissecting his layers of paint, we can visualize the deep, earthy tones of a forest interior, white blankets of snow beneath trees in winter, radiant yellow beams reminiscent of a bright sun and touches of blue suggesting a deep lake or vibrant sky. Perhaps Town’s “100% Canadian Landscape” communicates the iconic Canadian landscapes also painted by the Group of Seven. In a 1986 interview with Gary Michel Dault, Town remarked how he had once, as a young artist, paid very little attention to the Group, confessing that he had “seriously wondered, at one point, if Jock Macdonald had been a member...” The artist admitted to Dault that he came to praise the work of the Group of Seven as there was “nothing wrong with coming to my senses.” “100% Canadian Landscape” reveals Town’s powerful, modern take on our country’s terrain; one filled with energetic brushwork, heavy impasto, bold design and an unrivalled energy.