Wheat Field, Sun and Wind-Rotation of Spirit, 1987

Mira Godard Gallery, Toronto/Calgary Private Collection, Toronto Sotheby’s Canada, auction, Toronto, November 28, 2011, lot 59 Private Collection, Toronto

Otto Donald Rogers ‘The Intelligent Exercise of the Rational Soul’ in “Otto Donald Rogers”, Sante Fe, New Mexico, 2007, page 146

Born in 1935 in the small, rural Saskatchewan town of Kerrobert, it’s striking that Otto Donald Rogers would grow up to become an accomplished abstract painter. Not only did Rogers demonstrate an appreciation and aptitude for modern art as a young student, but he quickly managed to adapt this complex visual vocabulary into a rich, poetic artistic language all his own. Rogers encountered Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s and wrote about it’s formative influence; “In 1956, during a field trip to the Art Institute of Chicago, I saw for the first time the color-field paintings of Mark Rothko and the open- space compositions of Robert Motherwell. The colour saturation and intensity of light in the Rothkos and the broad expanse of form in the Motherwells were reminiscent of the Saskatchewan landscape that had been the first educator of my senses. The intoxication of the natural world experienced as a child now combined with the impressions of contemporary art to produce a transforming effect.” The open expanse of the prairie landscape remained a crucial aspect of Rogers’ painterly sensibility, directly informing the compositional structure of the paintings he produced throughout his life.