Untitled, 1956-57

Family of the artist Granville Fine Art, Vancouver Private Collection, Toronto

Iris Nowell, “Painters Eleven: The Wild Ones of Canadian Art’, Vancouver/ Toronto, 2010, page 278

Largely self-taught, Walter Yarwood worked as a freelance commercial artist in Toronto in the 1940s. He became friendly with fellow artists Harold Town and Oscar Cahén, who would invite him to join the first Painters Eleven exhibition held at Roberts Gallery in 1954. By this time, Yarwood’s paintings had become increasingly non- representational, inspired by the Abstract Expressionists, whose work he encountered in Buffalo, New York. This untitled work, completed in 1956-57 during the peak of the Painters Eleven, demonstrates Yarwood’s tendency toward the ‘Action painting’ direction that was taken by New York School artists such as Pollock and De Kooning, in contrast with Color-Field painting chosen by Rothko and Newman. The large and vibrant abstract composition is painted in dramatic overlapping curtains of red, blue and orange. On the artist’s exploration of contrasting colour, Iris Nowell writes: “Nothing is overdone in his strong colours; it’s as though a buzzer in his brain alerted him when to stop.”