The Fringe of the Coast, Nootka, B.C., 1936 by James Williamson Galloway Macdonald
Jock Macdonald
The Fringe of the Coast, Nootka, B.C., 1936
oil on board
signed and dated 1936 lower right; signed and titled on the reverse
12 x 15 in ( 30.5 x 38.1 cm )
Auction Estimate: $25,000.00 - $35,000.00
Price Realized $28,800.00
Sale date: November 27th 2024
The Art Emporium, Vancouver
Miss A. Bonnycastle, Vancouver, May 1936
Mr. and Mrs. G. A. Parker, Victoria
Gift to the present Private Collection, Ontario, 25 December 1984
The Art Emporium, Vancouver, April-May 1936 as "The Fringe of the Coast"
Joyce Zemans, "Jock Macdonald: The Inner Landscape", Toronto, 1981, page 62
Ian Thom, "Jock Macdonald: Evolving Form", Vancouver/London, 2014, page 161
JWG Macdonald, 'Art in Relation to Nature' reproduced in "Joyce Zemans, Jock Macdonald: Life & Work" [online publication], Art Canada Institute, Toronto, 2022, pages 106-116
Three years later, after announcing the College’s bankruptcy, Macdonald, his wife and daughter, along with his colleague, Harry Täuber and Täuber’s friend and lover, Les Planta, boarded the S.S. Princess Maquinna for the remote island of Nootka, home of the "Nuu-chah-nulth". (In March 1778, Captain James Cook became the first European to set foot on British Columbian soil when he visited Friendly Cove [Yuquot] on Nootka Island.)
Macdonald was hoping that, in leaving behind the economic reality of life during the Depression in Vancouver, he could explore his growing interest in the spiritual essence of art within the natural environment. He was also hoping to establish an artists’ colony. They took up residence in an abandoned cabin, three miles from the village of Friendly Cove, primarily eking sustenance from the land and the sea.
In the end, despite the hardships, his time at Nootka became a pivotal experience during which Macdonald confirmed his belief in the relationship between art and nature and evolved an artistic practice that included both representational work and experimentation with abstraction. The Nootka work, based both on his theoretical readings and the experience of working directly in nature, would become the basis for his artistic evolution.
Fascinated by the experience of the landscape and the sea, Macdonald worked at all times of day, recording the changing weather conditions and the experience of living in this remote and often challenging environment. He would come to know the shoreline well, from every vantage point, as he rowed to Friendly Cove to pick up provisions and mail.
In "The Fringe of the Coast, Nootka, B.C." we observe, through the artist’s eye, the desolate shoreline, the bleached and broken driftwood, the pools of water, the forlorn pine in the center of the work and the somewhat threatening clouds through which sunlight is filtered. But the painting is not just a literal interpretation of the scene, it is dominated by a strong rhythmic energy. Macdonald wrote: “Art is not found in the mere imitation of nature, but the artist does perceive through his study of nature the awareness of a force which is the one order to which the whole universe conforms... The interpretation of emotional feeling and emotional understanding is the problem of the artist... 'The Fringe of the Coast, Nootka, B.C.' embodies the artist’s emotions, capturing its viewers, and pulling them into the surging atmosphere of the painting."
While he created few major canvases during this period, Macdonald sent a number of smaller paintings back to his dealer, Harry Hood, at the Art Emporium in Vancouver. Revenues from these sales would help to sustain the family’s life on Nootka. "The Fringe of the Coast, Nootka, B.C.", probably painted on April 13th, 1936, was sent to Vancouver that month, along with a number of other oil on panel works which Barbara Macdonald, the artist’s wife, recalled “sold right away.” (The artist noted in his diary that this painting was sold to Miss A. Bonnycastle in May 1936.)
We extend our thanks to Joyce Zemans, art historian, curator, professor at York University, former director of the MBA Program in Arts, Media & Entertainment Management at the Schulich School of Business, and curator of the exhibition: "Jock Macdonald: The Inner Landscape" (AGO, 1981) and author of several publications on J.W.G. Macdonald, for contributing the preceding essay.
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James Williamson Galloway Macdonald
(1897 - 1960) Painters Eleven, Canadian Group of Painters,
Jock Macdonald was born on May 31, 1897 in Thurso, Scotland. A graduate of the Edinburgh College of Art, Macdonald emigrated to Canada in 1927 to become head of design and instructor in commercial advertising at the newly established Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts (now the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design). Inspired by the natural environment, Macdonald and his colleague Frederick Varley, head of drawing, painting, and composition, spent much of their free time on weekends and summer vacations on sketching and camping trips in the Garibaldi Mountains. When the Depression forced severe salary cuts in the art school budget, Macdonald and Varley decided to found the B.C. College of Art. It quickly established a reputation as a centre of new and stimulating ideas in a variety of art forms including music, dance and photography as well as the visual arts. The school operated for two years before declaring bankruptcy, but its influence on the local cultural community of the period is now legendary. Macdonald himself was infected by the exciting ideas fostered at the College and he began experiments in abstraction. He soon found landscape painting in the tradition of his Group of Seven contemporaries too confining whereas abstraction opened up new vistas of expressive freedom. During his twenty years in B.C., Macdonald was active as artist, teacher, exhibitor, and arts organizer. He was a member of the B.C. Society of Artists, with whom he exhibited regularly; a charter member of the Federation of Canadian Artists; and a member of the Vancouver Art Gallery Council for eleven years, serving on its judging, exhibitions and hanging committees, and implementing its popular Saturday morning classes. The Vancouver Art Gallery accorded Macdonald his first one man show in May 1941 and five years later mounted a solo exhibition, of his "automatic" watercolours. Macdonald moved to Toronto in 1947 and became instructor of painting at the Ontario College of Art. In 1953 he was instrumental in the founding of Painters Eleven, a group dedicated to the promotion of abstract art. He wrote later: "In training young students I believe it absolutely necessary that the student be provided a program of study which forces him to observe nature very closely in many diverse directions. After some two years of such study I encourage the student to expand his inner self and begin to expand his personality. I am quite aware that the young student is often intuitively aware of his consciousness of the twentieth century and could create in modern ways but I believe that every student should, first of all, increase his vocabulary of form and colours by observing nature forms and be initiated into the laws of balance and dynamic equilibrium." Jock Macdonald died at the age of 63 on December 3, 1960.
