Waddington Galleries, Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto
Literature
Roald Nasgaard, Abstract Painting in Canada, Toronto, 2007, page 290
Perehudoff began his artistic career as a watercolourist while continuing to experiment with transparencies and opacities in pigments throughout his later career as a colour field painter. Using unprimed canvases, the artist worked with the absorption of the raw linen with thin application of pigment. Large swaths of thinned neutral earth-tone pigments create a soft foundation layer to the composition with soft curving lines created from the movement of the brush. Creating vibrant contrast and energy, the artist places bright horizontal bars of solid bright pigments of contrasting blues, greens and fiery orange at the edges of the work. Purposefully placed, these elements draw the eye of the viewer over the composition, constantly moving and negotiating the relationship between the forms and colours. It is as if the bright bars of colour float in front of the neutral background and appear to be floating in space. In a final layer to the piece, Perehudoff has added a pearl-like neutral acrylic to the surface of the work. Utilizing a variety of wide and fine palette knives, the artist has applied very thin layers of the medium to highlight the verticality and horizontality of the forms within the artwork by way of thin lines of excess medium left from scraping. The three-dimensional quality of the final surface layer adds a sculptural element to the work giving further dimension to the image plane.
