Black Night, 1959

Isaacs Gallery, Toronto Private Collection, Toronto

Roald Nasgaard, Abstract Painting in Canada, Toronto, 2007, page 241 Paul Duval, John Meredith: A Retrospective, 1955 - 1990, introduction, Kaspar Gallery, Toronto, 1991, unpaginated

A student of Jock Macdonald at the Ontario College of Art, John Meredith had little interest in formal theories but worked instinctively and experientially, drawing from inner resources. The majority of his early works of the late 1950s and early 1960s are executed with a vigorous palette-knife impasto. Paul Duval writes of Meredith’s tendency toward this technique: “This encrusted richness of impasto has always held an attraction for young artists, and Meredith continued his affection for it into his vertical, stem-like compositions of the early 1960s.” The artist’s early paintings typically consist of abstract vertical stripes that are dark and tonal in colour, such as the black, brown and purple bands in “Black Night”. These stripes took on at first botanical references followed by human connotations, projecting a sense of mystery. Meredith’s work was constantly evolving, though consistently informed by a belief in the human presence as the ultimate subject of art.