Newzones Gallery of Contemporary Art, Calgary
Private Collection, Calgary
Literature
David Burnett, Iskowitz, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 1982, page 72
Adele Freedman, Gershon Iskowitz: Painter of Light, Toronto/Vancouver, 1982, pages 132 and 148
Peter Mellen, Landmarks of Canadian Art, Toronto, 1978, page 240
Roald Nasgaard, Abstract Painting in Canada, Toronto/Vancouver, 2007, page 244
Dennis Reid, A Concise History of Canadian Painting, third edition, Toronto, 2012, page 375
Upon immigrating to Canada after the Second World War, Iskowitz was heavily influenced by the Canadian landscape in his abstract works. Rather than rendering the land in traditional landscape art, the artist instead expressed this inspiration through the abstraction of bright contrasting forms. Often employing bright yellow, greens and blues, Iskowitz accentuated the contrast with layered white pigments that produced an ethereal cloud-like quality. Dennis Reid describes the artist’s process: “Iskowitz worked only at night under artificial light, in oils...He would build up a picture slowly, applying a colour, then when it had dried, applying another over it, leaving only parts of the previous layers exposed, thinly veiling others, or obscuring some parts entirely....” Not by coincidence, this aesthetic can be linked back to the artist's experience granted by the Canada Council to view the northern landscape by helicopter in 1967.
In “Spring Yellows - B” the viewer experiences the abstract composition as if from an aerial vantage point with the veil of white pigments opening to allow the coloured landscape below to be viewed. Iskowitz comments, “...the experience, out in the field, of looking up in the trees or in the sky, of looking down from the height of a helicopter. So what you try to do is make a composition of all those things, make some kind of reality...That's painting.”
In 1982, Freedman writes how over the past decade of his artistic production, Iskowitz's accents “have become more marked and their tone more confident and direct. They are about his excitement of discovering a new blue...a fresh nuance or shape.”
