AC-85-81, 1985

Waddington and Shiell Galleries, Toronto Art Rental Service of the Art Gallery of Ontario Private Collection, Toronto

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. In “AC-85-81”, a wash of thinned earth-toned pigments creates a soft foundation layer to the composition. Producing vibrant contrast and energy, the artist then applied bright vertical bars of intense and contrasting blues, greens and fiery orange across the canvas. These thick strokes of colour, painted with a glossy, tactile surface, appear to be floating in the calm grey space behind them. The three-dimensional quality of the final surface layer adds a sculptural element to the work giving further dimension to the image plane. The Emma Lake Workshops of the early 1960s profoundly impacted Perehudoff’s work. During these workshops, he was introduced to Post-Painterly Abstraction by art critic Clement Greenberg and American artist Kenneth Noland. Many of the artist’s magnificent horizontal canvases of the 1970s and 1980s, such as “AC-85-81”, reference the reductive formalism of Color-Field painting as well as the expansive prairie landscape of his native province. Nasgaard notes how these works exhibit “plays of light and dark, of transparency and opacity, [which] are subtle and sensuous.” In 1988, Perehudoff was honoured to serve as a workshop leader at Emma Lake. Perehudoff exhibited his work internationally, to significant acclaim, and in the late 1970s dedicated himself to his painting on a full-time basis. In the 1980s and 1990s, Perehudoff and his wife Dorothy Knowles spent more time in Langham, where they farmed and painted together.