Solitude, 1973

Acquired directly from the artist Private Collection, Toronto

While many of his contemporaries embraced the gestural mode of abstract expressionism, Kazuo Nakamura developed an idiosyncratic and personal approach to image-making. By embracing structure, pattern and rhythm, Nakamura explored painting through the conceptual context of science and mathematics. The artist perceived art and scientific thought as parallel frameworks which both represent humanity’s impulse to respond to profound questions of reality and existence. Nakamura explained “... I think there’s a sort of fundamental universal pattern in all art and nature. Painters are learning a lot from science now. In a sense, scientists and artists are doing the same thing. This world of pattern is a world we are discovering together.” Nakamura applied an experimental, abstract approach to landscape painting in “Solitude”. The work is restricted to yellow, green and blue hues, demonstrating a careful, almost pointillist paint-handling. The rhythm and repetition of small brush strokes reinforces the artist’s systematic and restrained methodology. “Solitude” deviates from the conventional landscape structure of a clear foreground, middle-ground and background, creating an ambiguous space made up of naturalistic and architectural forms. Kazuo Nakamura broadened Canadian art’s long history of the painted landscape, forging ahead into experimental new ground.