Untitled by Kenneth Campbell Lochhead
Ken Lochhead
Untitled
acrylic on paper on board
signed and dated 1962 lower right
26 x 20 ins ( 66 x 50.8 cms )
Auction Estimate: $2,500.00 - $3,500.00
Price Realized $4,012.00
Sale date: September 24th 2020
Bonham’s Canada, auction, May 31, 2010, Lot 268
Private Collection, Calgary
Ted Fraser, “Kenneth Lochhead: Garden of Light”, The MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina, 2005, published to The Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art [online]
“Terrence Heath interview with Ken Lochhead”, July 13, 1989 in “Terrence Heath, Ronald L. Bloore: Not Without Design”, MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina, 1991 [online]
Lochhead worked closely with Ron Bloore and was very aware of the Toronto art scene during the late 1950s and 1960s. Similar to Bloore, Lochhead experimented with a calligraphic lexicon in his works of the early 1960s, evidenced in “Untitled” with the tonal traces of geometric patterning within the segments of the composition. Like Michael Snow's late works of the 1950s, such as “Off Minor” (1958), Lochhead's “Untitled” pays homage to the tradition of landscape painting within Canada but abstracts the pictorial field into geometric swaths of layered segments, punctuated with high contrast of light and dark. Ted Fraser discusses these early works of the 1960s, explaining that they “explored the massing of lines based on landscape.” In an interview with Lochhead from 1989, Terrence Heath explains that “Ken Lochhead remembers his fascination with the objects that imaginative individuals made in towns and farms of the Prairies and in the geometric patterns which resulted from the various processes of dry land farming.” Inspired by familiar elements, the fence-like pattern at the lower third of the white foreground subtly references the rural farms of the Prairies. In this work, the viewer bears witness to the emerging hard edge abstraction brewing in Lochhead's artistic progression, an important token of the artist’s shift from the landscape tradition to modern abstraction within the canon of Canadian art history.
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Kenneth Campbell Lochhead
(1926 - 2006) Regina Five, Order of Canada
Ken Lochhead was born in Ottawa, in 1926. His interest in art began during his high school years. He was struggling in school, particularly with Latin. So, Lochhead and his grandmother persuaded his parents to enroll him in a summer studio course at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario. He earned a Matriculation Certificate from Glebe Collegiate in 1944, and took a commercial art course at the Ottawa Technical School of Fine Arts. Continuing his education, Lochhead attended a four-year undergraduate program at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in Philadelphia where he studied illustration, painting, and watercolour. Due to generous scholarships, Lochhead was able to travel and study throughout Europe in 1948.
In 1950, Lochhead was invited to teach drawing and painting courses at Carleton University in Ottawa. In the same year Lochhead won a painting contest sponsored by O'Keefe Brewing Company for his oil painting titled "Fishermen" (1949). The art competition was for artists between the ages of eighteen and thirty. He won $1000 and gained significant publicity and was invited to be the Director of the School of Art at Regina College. At only twenty-four years old, Lochhead was employed to establish the school and facilitate the Norman MacKenzie art collection. Immediately, Lochhead was inspired by his new location and began to explore his new home through painting and sketching. Lochhead was most curious about the villages and farm homes near Regina and began depicting them in his work.
The Emma Lake Professional Artists' Workshops, a summer artist program affiliated with the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon was taught by Augustus Kenderdine. In 1955, Lochhead, a professor at the University of Saskatchewan, Regina Campus (now the University of Regina), began teaching at the summer program.
His 1957 mural "Flight and Its Allegories" at the international airport terminal in Gander, Newfoundland, sparked Lochhead's interest in depicting birds in his works. In 1964, Lochhead moved to Winnipeg to begin teaching at the School of Fine Art at the University of Manitoba.
In 1960, Lochhead exhibited with Arthur McKay, Douglas Morton, Ted Godwin and Ronald Bloore in "Five Painters from Regina" at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. Fondly known as 'The Regina Five', this group of abstract painters, along with Clifford Wiens, became an active artists community in Saskatchewan.
While in Winnipeg, Lochhead's paintings were still inspired by the natural world. By 1970, he began applying paint with a spray gun in a large downtown warehouse that had been converted into a studio. Lochhead continued to use this method during his time spent teaching at York University in Toronto, but eventually turned to other media upon his move to Ottawa to teach at the University of Ottawa in 1975. No longer using a spray gun, Lochhead began using oil, enamel, watercolor, and pastels to explore birds and the natural environment that surrounded him. Interested in the playful nature of birds he would often drive out of the city to draw natural landscapes. He also spent time exploring Ottawa's gardens and the Arboretum at the Central Experimental Farm. Finally, Lochhead and his wife purchased a cottage adjacent to the Gatineau River in 1983. With help from his son, Lochhead built a studio in the woods near his house where he could observe the forest and incorporate it into his paintings.
In the early 1990s, Lochhead began to paint more figurative images based off of photographs. He painted portraits of random strangers, politicians, and eventually professional sports teams. Until his death in 2006, Lochhead painted the world around him in his studio in the forest or while on holiday in the Canadian Rockies and the Maritime Provinces. Lochhead has exhibited throughout Canada and the United States, including numerous solo exhibitions. He has been given the honour of the Order of Canada and the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts.
Literature Sources:
Joanne Lochhead, Colour is of the Senses. University of Regina, 2018
A Dictionary of Canadian Artists, Volume I: A-F, compiled by Colin S. MacDonald, Canadian Paperbacks Publishing Ltd, Ottawa, 1977
We extend our thanks to Danie Klein, York University graduate student in art history, for writing and contributing this artist biography.
