Exhibited
Ontario Society of Artists 79th Annual Spring Exhibition, Art Gallery of Toronto, March 10 - April 15, 1951, no. 14
Canadian National Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture, Toronto, August 24 - September 8, 1951, no. 28
Literature
Paul Duval, Alfred Joseph Casson, President, Royal Canadian Academy, Toronto, 1951, reproduced page 62
Hubert De Santana, A Painter’s Life: A.J. Casson looks back on 60 years at the easel, Canadian Art, Spring 1985, pages 64-69
Paul Duval, A.J. Casson, Toronto, 1951, unpaginated
As one of Canada’s most prominent landscape painters, Alfred Joseph Casson was loyal to the wilderness and villages of Ontario. “Storm in the Cloche Hills” (1951) portrays one of the artist’s preferred subjects for many years, the La Cloche Mountains. Teeming with mood from dramatic shadows and cloud formations, the canvas serves as an exemplary representation of Casson’s famed landscape paintings, and particularly of his increasingly abstract approach of the late 1940s and early 50s.
An uneven terrain of converging grey rocks dominates the foreground of the composition, the centre of which is illuminated from what must be a short break in the heavily clouded sky. Located in the Canadian Shield region and among the highest altitudes in Ontario, the La Cloche Mountains are composed of white quartzite, as emphatically illustrated by the artist. From 1948 to 1950, Casson’s preferred location to paint was the La Cloche channel. In a letter to the current owner in 1972, Casson wrote of this painting: “I visited the Cloche Hills many times and found a great amount of painting material there. I am pleased to know that the picture has found a good home as it is one of the best canvases I made in that location.”
Many of the larger rocks that recede into the distance of the composition are covered by dark shadows, as are a few slender trees growing amid the rugged ground. Dark grey clouds hover over the land, with only a small opening of teal sky in the distance, suggesting the impending storm announced in the painting’s title. Paul Duval praises Casson’s skill of depicting an ephemeral moment or scene, such as a passing storm, as if frozen in time. The author remarks, “Like the contemporary American realist, Edward Hopper, he has the ability to crystallize a moment, to make concrete and eternal the passing vision. It is as though the time-machine has suddenly ceased to function, in a world where the wind had stopped breathing and the shadows no longer moved and every blade of glass and cloud were fixed forever.”
A.J. Casson had a traditional artistic training, beginning his career as a fairly realistic artist, with increased individuality developing in the 1930s and 40s, particularly in atmosphere and dramatic lighting. “Storm in the Cloche Hills” exemplifies the painter’s marked shift to a more abstract rendering of the Ontario landscape, which occurred in the mid-1940s. Duval mentions that this change coincided with the end of the war, which may have subconsciously brought Casson an emotional release and a longing for simplicity. The artist began to portray nature in reductive, abstract designs, foregoing literal atmospheric portrayal. Duval writes of this shift: “Suddenly, all of the elements in his paintings become highly simplified into formal patterns. Shapes are condensed into knife-edged rectangles and triangles. Colours are plotted into very deliberate counterpointal arrangements, and natural texture is subdued almost to the point of elimination. Design has become paramount.” The author’s description of Casson’s new style is demonstrated in “Storm in the Cloche Hills”, where the rock forms appear flattened and smooth, and the clouds angular and planar.
Common to Casson’s work throughout his career is a limited colour palette. In a 1985 interview, the artist recalls this strategy as being present since his early days with the Group of Seven, when “exhibitions were flaming with colour.” He elaborated by stating: “Well, I’ve always thought that if you want to stand out, don’t follow the herd. I was inclined to go into subtle greys, to get away from the gaudy. I painted a few gaudy ones, but they never appealed to me.” In “Storm in the Cloche Hills”, Casson’s restricted palette is evident, containing repeating shades of grey throughout the rocks and clouds, and similarly-toned greens in the trees and sky. Duval considers this canvas in particular as a prime example of Casson’s work of dramatic landscapes of the period, writing: “The unleashed power of nature has marked such commanding compositions by the artist as [...] “Storm in the Cloche Hills” (1951).”
