Untitled, 1960-1961 by Ronald Langley Bloore

Provenance:
Moore Gallery Ltd., Toronto
Private Collection

Ronald Bloore’s vibrant abstract is composed of thickly applied fragments of black, yellow, and turquoise paint. Mostly angular but never geometrical, it is clear that these forms were rendered by hand. They float in a white space whose textures mimic those of the coloured shapes and are distributed equally across the hard, masonite surface. Nowhere do they coalesce into figures; the forms are instead cut off at the edges of the painting, suggesting that we are looking at a much larger panoply of colour and form. While Bloore’s surface suggests perpetual motion and change, the behaviour of his forms is less random than it might at first appear. Whether we track the yellow, turquoise, or black elements, we see independent forms in their own space but also occasional overlaps and linkages between elements of different colours. In the bottom left, for example, two yellows are joined by a turquoise. The largest shapes are no more than three or four times bigger than the smallest. What we see is painterly thought in motion.

Ronald Bloore—and thus this painting from his early career—are part of the storied history of abstract art in Canada, its aesthetic, institutional, and interpersonal dimensions. A significant painter who, from 1963, focused for decades almost exclusively on the uses of white pigment in his compositions, Bloore was also at the centre of the influential collection of artists that came to be called the Regina Five following the National Gallery of Canada's nationally touring exhibition, "Five Painters from Regina" in 1961. The exhibit included Bloore, Kenneth Lochhead, Arthur McKay, Douglas Morton, and Ted Godwin. The artists were committed to a then new and radical program of abstract painting. As is more often than not the case with art groups, however, the members were not unified or single- minded. They disbanded in the '60s, but not before creating bodies of significant painting and, on the institutional side, creating a prominent international forum for advanced abstract art, the Emma Lake Artists Workshop (founded by Lochhead and McKay in 1955). These yearly workshops included artists from across Canada and session leaders from both this country and the USA, most famously and influentially, Barnett Newman in 1959 and the powerful art critic Clement Greenberg in 1962. Crucially for Bloore and his colleagues, abstract art thus became central in professional art circles in Anglophone Canada and the work coming initially from Regina took on an international bearing. The Regina Five years were only the beginning for Bloore, who took up a teaching position at York University in Toronto in 1966. He influenced many students and colleagues in this role for over twenty years.

We extend our thanks to Mark A. Cheetham for contributing the preceding essay. Mark is the author of two books on abstract art: "The Rhetoric of Purity: Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting" and "Abstract Art Against Autonomy: Infection, Resistance, and Cure since the '60s." He is an independent writer, curator and professor of Art History at the University of Toronto.