Provenance:

Gallery Moos, Toronto

Literature:

Constance Naubert-Riser, Jean McEwen, Colour in Depth, Montreal, 1987, p.41.

Note:

Jean McEwen, born in 1923 in Montreal, is arguably Canada’s most talented abstract colourfield painter and is most recognized for his large, deeply saturated works.

McEwen had many contemporary influences: Paul-Émile Borduas, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Sam Francis and Barnett Newman, who were pushing abstraction to its limits and exploring the relationship of structure to colour.

McEwen was never formally trained but had a fascination with painting and the qualities of colour at an early age.

Arc-en-Ciel Rouge contains evidence of this fascination by his organization of the flat space of the canvas through colour by superimposing reds, yellows and blacks. Here, McEwen used layers upon layers of paint, covering one layer of colour with another, in effect changing the depth for our eye and playing with light and dark effects.

McEwen often applied colour directly onto the canvas with his hands, later shaping the surface with a palette knife. He also worked different pigments into his varnish, to create unusual, translucent effects.

Much is written about McEwen’s restructuration of flat space, especially in Constance Naubert-Riser’s catalogue from the exhibition Jean McEwen, Colour in Depth, presented at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Naubert-Riser writes “all the series executed between 1960 and 1963 were increasingly dominated by the employment of verticals – either to balance the pictorial plane or to introduce a certain rhythm.”

Arc-en-Ciel Rouge was painted in 1962 and one can see this use of verticals creating a balance and symmetry even though the surface of the canvas is divided into two irregular fields.