Private Collection, United Kingdom
Private Collection, Ontario
Literature
Maxwell Bates, “Jock Macdonald: Painter-Explorer”, Canadian Art, XIV: 4 Summer 1957, pages 151-53
Joyce Zemans, “Jock Macdonald: The Inner Landscape”, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 1981, page 116
Macdonald was painting surrealist inspired “automatic” works when he relocated to Toronto from the west in 1947. At the same time, an automatic approach to art was being explored by the Automatistes in Montreal. Macdonald first exhibited the watercolours in the summer and fall of 1946 in British Columbia, followed by an exhibition in 1947 at the San Francisco Museum of Art. In this delightful watercolour, dark shapes frame the marvelous central energies and there is richness in colour and form.
In an article discussing Jock Macdonald's work, artist Maxwell Bates writes: “What Macdonald wanted to express could not be expressed in naturalistic or objective terms... Automatic painting opened up unsuspected ways of showing his feelings.” Joyce Zemans notes that the artist's “discovery of automatism [was] the key to all of his future works.”
The automatics display Macdonald's virtuosity as a watercolourist. He was appointed the President of the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour in 1952. The following year, Macdonald would be a founding member of the Painters Eleven.
