Picture for Heather #4, 1960

Private Collection, Toronto

By 1960, Harold Town was a rising star of modern art in Canada. His steadily growing notoriety paralleled the broader cultural development of Toronto. The late 1950s had brought the city a new concentration of wealth, which in turn energized the art scene and brought increasing attention to its experimental artists. Along with his fellow members of Painters Eleven, Town had keenly absorbed the influence of artists such as Willem de Kooning and Pablo Picasso. A restless innovator, Town deliberately avoided confining his artistic practice to a unified visual style. This work is one of a series of paintings Town dedicated to his daughter. Fittingly, the work exudes a playful, child- like quality. In a departure from the dense layering of his gestural “Big Attack Paintings”, Town radically pared down his paint application while embracing spontaneity. Essentially structured as a large drawing, the artist employed bold, simplified lines and flat areas of colour. A dynamic composition is created through the use of diagonal lines and the negative space of the lower half. Concentrated, calligraphic forms in the upper half are gently veiled with cadmium orange-red. The thick black lines and reductive forms are reminiscent of the late work of Paul Klee. This painting marks the gradual transition of the artist’s oeuvre from the gestural paintings of the 1950s towards a greater conceptual and pop influence in the 1960s and 1970s.