Waddington Galleries, Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto
Literature
Roald Nasgaard, Abstract Painting in Canada, Toronto/Vancouver, 2007, page 287
William 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. In “AC-83-92”, a wash of thinned aqua pigment on the unprimed canvas creates a soft foundation layer to the composition. Producing vibrant contrast and energy, the artist then applied large dabs of intense and contrasting multicoloured paint across the canvas. These thick strokes of colour, painted with a glossy, tactile surface, appear to be floating amid the calm space behind them, like a blue sky. The three-dimensional quality of the final surface layer adds a sculptural element and further dimension to the image. Roald Nasgaard notes how Perehudoff’s abstract works of the 1980s exhibit “plays of light and dark, of transparency and opacity, [which] are subtle and sensuous.”
