Auto-portrait ocre et rouge #6, 1980

Marlborough Godard Gallery, Toronto/Montreal Robertson Galleries, Ottawa Private Collection, Toronto

Roald Nasgaard, “Abstract Painting in Canada”, Vancouver/Toronto, 2007, pages 174-78 Constance Naubert-Riser, “Jean McEwen: Colour in Depth, paintings and works on paper, 1951-1987”, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1987, pages 46-49

Over the course of his influential painting career, Jean McEwen experimented with various techniques in applying colour to his canvases. He was one of the first Quebec artists following the Automatiste movement to explore colour in such depth and on a monumental scale. He turned to acrylic paint for a few years, experimented in hard-edge painting and explored several compositional formats for his abstract paintings, but the constant that remained in his work was his insistence on the importance of colour. Roald Nasgaard describes McEwen’s devotion to colour, “His continuous coloured textures are built out of strata of superimposed paint layers, sometimes as many as a dozen. Their ever more variegated hues and tones lie in ambiguous depths, sometimes opaque and other times transparent and luminous. Light emanates from within them or it reflects from their surfaces, and often they seem dappled like sunlight in a Renoir nude.” “Auto-portrait ocre et rouge #6”, is one of McEwen’s mature canvases, exemplifying his complex layering technique of oil paint in a variety of colours. The initial colour scheme that the viewer can identify is pale grey and mint green; however upon closer examination, especially taking into account the title’s mention of ochre and red, one can find many other hues, including yellow, red, blue and pink throughout the layers of pigment. The artist wanted his abstract paintings to be a sensory experience for the viewer. Constance Naubert-Riser writes that McEwen was so preoccupied by the realm of pure sensation that “he felt no need to burden his paintings with transcendental meaning.” His layered canvases, such as “Auto-portrait ocre et rouge #6”, achieves intricate textural effects resulting from the varying thicknesses of the pictorial surface, and contains “effects of depth that push the possibilities offered by the medium to their very limits.” In the year 1980, McEwen found great success within the Canadian art scene; he was the subject of solo exhibitions in Quebec City and Calgary, and accepted a lecturer position for a fine arts course on colour at l’Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières. He had returned from a ten month stay in Paris in June 1978, and exhibited a highly colourful “Suite parisienne” series shortly thereafter. The subsequent Autoportrait series is markedly calmer and more muted in its palette, possibly in reaction to preceding works. “Auto-portrait ocre et rouge #6” exemplifies McEwen’s ability to continuously explore colour throughout his career in a consistently evolving and refreshing manner.