Roald Nasgaard, “Abstract Painting in Canada”, Toronto/Vancouver, 2007, page 290
Nancy E. Dillow, “William Perehudoff: Recent Paintings”, Norman Mackenzie Art Gallery, Regina, 1978, page 7
The Emma Lake Workshops of the early 1960s profoundly impacted the work of Saskatchewan artist, William Perehudoff. During these workshops, he was introduced to Post-Painterly Abstraction by art critic Clement Greenberg and American artist Kenneth Noland. Many of the artist’s magnificent horizontal canvases of the mid-to-late 1970s were constructed of coloured ground transversed by vibrant parallel bars of colour. Nasgaard notes how these works exhibit “plays of light and dark, of transparency and opacity, [which] are subtle and sensuous.”
“AC-77-6” contains “the horizontal stretch of colour...[that] vibrates like a violin string, activating the entire canvas.” The long parallel stripes incite thoughts of the prairie landscape; the purity of the level, immense fields that were central to Perehudoff’s life and work.
