Untitled Composition

watercolour

signed lower right

11.25 × 9 in (28.6 × 22.9 cm)

Auction Estimate:$2,500 - $3,500

Sale date:May 29, 2018

Price Realized

$2,360

(including Buyer's Premium)

Provenance

Canadian Fine Arts, Toronto Private Collection, Toronto

Alexandra Luke met Jock Macdonald in the summer of 1945 at the Banff School of Fine Arts, where Macdonald taught “automatic drawing”, the technique seen here in Luke's “Untitled Composition” of the period. Her style had remained quite naturalistic until this point and the influence of Macdonald's automatism on her practice would be lasting. In the summers which followed, Alexandra Luke attended American-German painter Hans Hofmann's school in Massachusetts and further developed her newfound affinity for abstraction.