Additional Images

Provenance:

Private collection, Toronto, ON

Note:

In 1958, A.J. Casson retired after a 45-year career in commercial art, during which he was respected for his perfectionism and his refined understanding of colour and linear design. Old Barn–Grenville, Quebec conveys how well Casson could compose. Painted when abstraction dominated artistic trends, Casson’s grey, silhouetted hills and voluminous sky are only understood as such because of the barn in front of them. In their design and painting he created something more like 1950s Giorgio Morandi than 1920s Group of Seven.

The old barn anchors the composition and sets the viewer’s eye in motion. Attention is reflected up to the passages of grey in the top half of the composition, laterally across the fields and bushes beginning to change colour with the season, and reflected out toward the picture plane in the field of grass which rolls like the sea. The face of the barn glows in the light of the sun above to the left outside of the image and torquing to the composition. In a little over a decade of retirement, Casson settled into a new career, no longer an artist-designer, but strictly an artist.