Additional Images

Provenance:

Laing Galleries, Toronto, ON;
Private Collection, New York, USA;
Heffel Fine Art Auction House, Toronto, ON, 26 Nov 2015, lot 68;
Private Collection, Ontario

Note:

Nakamura’s reflection works are among his most recognizable. Commercial demand was also strong, with Nakamura’s wife Lillian referring to them as his bread and butter. The artist had been painting landscape scenes since his internment as an “enemy alien” during the Second World War, a period which spanned from 1942-1944. These early wartime works would form the foundation of the landscapes and patterns that exemplify Nakamura’s mature oeuvre. The use of reflections also dates back to these strained teenage years.

Summer Reflection was painted in 1960, around the time that the Painters Eleven decided to disband. Nakamura had long stood apart from the group stylistically: while his peers focused on action or reaction painting, Nakamura focused on the inter-relationship between art and science. In a 1956 interview, the artist explains that “there’s a sort of fundamental universal pattern in all art and nature. Painters are learning a lot from science now. In a sense, scientists and artists are doing the same thing. This world of pattern is a world we are discovering together.”

Nakamura’s paintings fuse landscape with abstraction. Ihor Holubizky, writing for The Robert McLaughlin Gallery in 2001, explained that “Nakamura is thinking about nature, not engaged in a pictorial endeavour. His interest is in internal structures, the law of order that lies in everything.” Generally, Nakamura painted these landscapes from memory, rather than seeking to depict a specific location.

John G. Hatch, associate professor of art history and Chair of the Department of Visual Arts at Western University writes that by 1960, “reflections on water seem to take on an increasing importance as symbols of another reality underlying our visible world.” In Summer Reflection, densely rendered patterns in a green lake and green forest have an enveloping, totalizing effect. Only experience—and a patch of pale blue sky—situate the viewer, dictating which way is up and which is down in Nakamura’s kaleidoscopic woodland.

References:
John G. Hatch, Kazuo Nakamura: Life & Work. (Toronto: Art Canada Institute, 2021).

Further reading.

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