Shell Pattern by Ethel Seath

Provenance:
Private Collection, Calgary

Exhibited:
“Ethel Seath (1879-1963) Retrospective Exhibition”, Galerie Walter Klinkhoff, Montreal, September 1987, no. 37
The University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, Alberta, 1988 (on loan)

Literature:
Evelyn Walters, “The Women of Beaver Hall: Canadian Modernist Painters”, Toronto, 2005, page 117

Ethel Seath worked as an illustrator and later an art teacher in Montreal; in her spare time she took sketching classes and trips with William Brymner, Edmond Dyonnet and Maurice Cullen with the Art Association of Montreal. A member of the Beaver Hall Group, she took trips to the Lower Saint Lawrence region, the Eastern Townships and Nova Scotia with fellow members Nora Collyer and Sarah Robertson, which inspired her landscapes and harbour scenes. Seath was distinctly a modernist. A Montreal Star exhibition review remarked that “Seath’s first concern is with colour and design. She gets them both from the earth and the fruits of the earth... But while she clings to the things she knows and loves, she has a strong sense of their abstract qualities.”

“Shell Pattern” exemplifies the artist’s ability of depicting everyday objects with an eye for abstract qualities. In this oil painting, a closeup view of seashells and plants are painted in vibrant colours, emphasizing the interplay of various forms and lines. The decorative, abstract treatment of the space is characteristically Seath; her composition uses objects in nature as means for an exploration in colour and design.