Bau-Xi Gallery, Toronto
Art Gallery of Ontario Art Rental Service, Toronto
Corporate Collection, Toronto
Literature
Stephen Hunt, “Acclaimed Regina 5 artist Ted Godwin dies in Calgary”, The Calgary Herald, January 1, 2013
The youngest of the Regina Five, Ted Godwin achieved his breakthrough and established his reputation as an abstract painter in the 1960s. Later in his career the artist returned to representational painting, depicting the Canadian landscape on a large scale and in exuberant colours. “Ivory Point, Low Tide” showcases Godwin’s keen sense for colour, in its vibrant palette of teal, aqua and green. The canvas also demonstrates the artist’s interest more specifically in the water’s edge and the reflection of shorelines. Following a series on the Lower Bow River in the early 1990s, Godwin went on to paint Canadian scenes from the east arm of Great Slave Lake to Nahanni, to Kluane, and Whales Island on the northwest coast. Jeffrey Spalding of the Calgary Museum of Contemporary Art remarks on Godwin’s courageousness to abandon abstraction for representational painting, stating that “to turn his back on that...was quite brave. He embraced a whole legacy of representational painting, to rejoin the legacy you could trace back to Illingworth Kerr — even the Group of Seven — and he created stunning, inventive work. That took an enormous amount of personal courage.”
