Adele Freedman, Gershon Iskowitz: Painter of Light, Toronto/Vancouver, 1982, pages 132 and 148
Roald Nasgaard, Abstract Painting in Canada, Toronto/Vancouver, 2007, page 244
Peter Mellen, Landmarks of Canadian Art, Toronto, 1978, page 240
Iskowitz’s paintings of the 1970s and 80s are comprised of magnificent vivid shapes in contrasting tones that create an ethereal, cloudlike quality. 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.” In “Night Blues - G”, the artist appears to have discovered one of his “new blues”, with its striking cobalt pigment that overlaps the contrasting colours beneath. On the same subject, Nasgaard writes that Iskowitz, by the 1980s, had “upped the ante by electrifying his colours, intensifying their contrasts and hardening the contours of his forms.”
The Canadian landscape provided Iskowitz with constant inspiration, particularly in the ever-changing patterns of the sky. Rather than rendering the land in traditional landscape art, he instead expressed this inspiration through the abstraction of bright contrasting forms. Iskowitz drew on his personal recollections of experiences with landscape for his work, explaining that he would take “...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.”
Gershon Iskowitz - Night Blues - G | Cowley Abbott
