Near Kincardine, 1968

Private Collection, Toronto

Hubert De Santana, A Painter’s Life: A.J. Casson looks back on 60 years at the easel, “Canadian Art”, Spring 1985, pages 64-69

“Near Kincardine” bears the hallmarks of Casson’s most iconic visual vocabulary— a dramatic clouded sky, abstracted forest landscape, and a simple rural home with a white plastered exterior quintessential to the Ontario landscape. Locally known as the gateway to the Sunshine Coast and the Bruce Peninsula, Kincardine boasts access to beautiful shorelines, charming communities and ample opportunity for boating and hiking. During this period, Casson rented a cottage in the Kincardine area with his family and spent his time searching for picturesque locales to paint. For Casson, the location provided a multitude of prospects to capture the inhabited rural landscape. In this work, Casson’s compositional arrangement invites the viewer into the landscape with the expert use of a winding road in forced perspective. Casson employed a limited colour palette throughout his career. In an interview in 1985, the artist recalls this strategy as being present since his early days with the Group of Seven, when “exhibitions were flaming with colour.” Casson elaborated, “Well, I’ve always thought that if you want to stand out, don’t follow the herd. I was inclined to go into subtle greys, to get away from the gaudy. I painted a few gaudy ones, but they never appealed to me.”