Additional Images

Provenance:

Private Collection, Toronto, ON

Note:

After painting sophisticated shaped, sometimes multi-partite, paintings that intentionally defied the boundaries of painting and sculpture – and successfully showing them at Toronto’s Carmen Lamanna Gallery in the late 1960s – Bolduc took time off for travel. During that break, while in Paris, he saw the centenary retrospective of Henri Matisse (1869-1954) organised by Pierre Schneider at the Grand Palais (1970), which would change his artistic path. It sparked him to pursue complexity within seemingly simple structures.[1] From this catalyst he developed his signature works of nearly square paintings distinguished by fields of subtly modulated colour and punctuated by rays of pure colour squeezed in vertical lines in the centre of the paintings. After years of effort, experimentation and variation, Kohl is an outstanding and a deeply moving example of this form, a lush manifestation of that exposure to Matisse more than 20 years earlier.

Prior to painting the imagery that can be observed in Kohl, Bolduc applied irregular textures to enliven the surface and create visual interest. Among others, this technique was most famously used by Claude Monet (1840-1926) in his late works including his views of London and the Thames, and most dramatically and to greatest effect in his majestic paintings of water lilies. Upon that texture Bolduc laid in loose horizontal strokes of deep cuprous green. In the centre of the canvas he drew a spiral in paint squeezed directly from the tube. Then, over the painting’s surface he dripped diluted paint in copper oxide blue and copper brown from top to bottom creating a soft, metallic cascade or veil. Finally, upon this field he again squeezed paint directly from the tube. The bands of paint clustered in the centre of the lower half of the painting, rise and emanate slightly like rays or stems in a bouquet, their pure colour rising off the canvas.

With prolonged viewing, the history of the painting unfolds as truncated arrow-like shapes emerge from under the cuprous veil. Bolduc’s deep engagement with painting never wavered, and even with his intimate late landscapes, the well-honed care for colour we see in Kohl remained. To give Bolduc the last word, “I’m interested in taking a nothing colour and giving it some bite to make it warmer. I’m not trying to be innovative. I’m trying to make an object you haven’t seen before. Colour is all I’m working with.” [2]

[1] Roald Nasgaard, Abstract Painting in Canada (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre; Halifax: Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, 2007): 251.
[2] John Metcalf, “The hard-won simplicity of David Bolduc,” Canadian Art, vol. 3, no. 2 (Summer / June 1986), p. 48.