Suspension 5, 1968

Private Collection, Toronto

Iris Nowell, “Painters Eleven: The Wild Ones of Canadian Art”, Vancouver/ Toronto, 2010, page 301 and 305

Influenced by Jock Macdonald’s interest in László Moholy-Nagy’s reading of science, Nakamura was concerned with the fundamental universal patterns found in nature and science. One of the artist’s favourite magazines was Scientific American, lending insight into the artist’s fascination and preoccupation with exploring the sciences and mathematics. On Nakamura, Ihor Holubizky explains: “more than the difference between his work and that of his contemporaries, [is] the manner in which the work forms an interdependent whole, and a system unto itself.” He continues that the artist seemed to have been “searching for some ‘cosmic insight’ or truth.” Nakamura seemed to have used his artistic practice as the vehicle in deeper exploration into the mathematical cosmos. Working with themes over an extended period of time, Nakamura was very process-based in his work. Favouring the distillation of restrained, meditative calm, Nakamura looked to the principles of mathematics and geometry to balance his artworks with exacting precision. Pursuing “a further purity of expression”, the artist revisits the still life genre again with his use of fruits and florals, encircled by a jagged white border contrasting the inky indigo background in “Suspension 5”. The still-life objects explore the elegance and tranquility of simple organic beauty, blending with the background and hanging suspended in the pictorial space. Gentle tonal variation is a hallmark of Nakamura’s late 1960s works in which the artist employs subtle tonal shifts to embrace a restrained calm. Encouraging prolonged engagement and reflection, “Suspension 5” is an excellent example of the artist’s marriage of figurative and abstract painting in the canon of post-war Canadian art.