Provenance:

The Here and Now Gallery, Toronto.
Private Collection, Toronto.

Literature:

Roald Nasgaard, Abstract Painting in Canada, Vancouver/Toronto, 2007,
page 115.
Joyce Zemans, Jock Macdonald: The Inner Landscape, A Retrospective
Exhibition, The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 1981, pages 211 and 228, reproduced page 234.

Exhibited:

Jock Macdonald: The Inner Landscape, A Retrospective Exhibition, The
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 1981, no. 147. Also shown at the
Art Gallery of Windsor.

Note:

In autumn of 1959, Macdonald painted a series of majestic yellow canvases. Zeman writes that the artist described these particular canvases as “soft, delicate and airy”, their imagery scattering upon the canvas in dynamic interrelationships. At this time, Macdonald was in the practice of projecting microscopic slides for his students, the acid drops taking on wonderful natural forms which could then be pursued in painting. Lilt of Songs addresses this exploration and translation of organic forms. Macdonald’s amorphous shapes incite a sense of mystery, the painting’s title suggesting the presence of an effervescent musical rhythm.

Nasgaard comments that, by 1957, “Macdonald’s painting had entirely come out of ‘the box’ and was quite free of Cubist structuring.” Visible in Lilt of Songs, the imagery is “less composed”, but appears more “self-composing”, Macdonald’s red and yellow paints expanding and retreating as if entirely “subject to natural forces”. Completed just a year before the artist’s death, Lilt of Songs exemplifies Macdonald’s wish to create non-objective masterpieces that he described as “alive with [the] spiritual rhythm and organic and cosmic order which rule the universe.”