Les Lacs du Nord , 1957

Private Collection, Toronto

“4 Canadians”, Art Gallery of Toronto, travelling to UBC Fine Arts Gallery, November 1957-July 1958

Michèle Grandbois, “Jean Paul Lemieux: Life & Work” [online publication], Art Canada Institute, Toronto, 2016, pages 55, 61 and 63

During the 1950s and 60s, as Quebec was experiencing a period of artistic innovation with flourishing avant-garde abstract movements, Jean Paul Lemieux turned away from narrative to focus on the flat space of the picture plane. He never fully embraced abstraction, however; the artist rather painted large, empty landscapes with a bare horizon line or a figure in the foreground. These features came to be the defining traits of Lemieux’s “classic period”, categorized as dating between 1956 and 1970. Michèle Grandbois writes that the artist’s deserted landscapes from this time, which include “Les Lacs, Dunord” dating to 1967, “are charged with feelings of time passing, of death, of the human condition, and of the loneliness and smallness of human beings before the infinite horizons of the vast landscapes of Canada.” The oil painting presents a view from above of a forest surrounding small bodies of water. The scene is abundant with nature, but barren of any human presence. Soft brushstrokes and a muted colour palette that is calming yet almost eerie. The colour scheme is also in keeping with the period: Grandbois remarks that “his palette was now limited to just a few pigments: olive green, white, shades of ochre, earth colours, and red. [...] Lemieux used subdued, in-between shades that accorded with the meditative nature of these canvases. The softened tones parallel the evocation of memory, and the monochrome or oligochrome (reduced) palettes add to the effect of immensity created by the horizontal format.” Up until the late 1950s, Lemieux had painted directly from nature and often outdoors. He then switched to working exclusively from inside his studio, without models, and using only daylight for illumination. The artist declared: “I am painting … an interior world. I have stored up a lot of things.” He elaborated on his spontaneous approach that stemmed from his imagination, stating “You are guided by the picture much more often than you guide it. And that can lead to results completely unlike what you may have intended or planned.”