signed and dated 1989 lower right; signed, titled and dated on the reverse; unframed
40 × 30 in (101.6 × 76.2 cm)
Acquired directly from the Artist
Private Collection
Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov, Charles Pachter, Toronto, 1992, pages 4, 5, 139
Known for his vibrant imagery and distinctly Canadian subject matter, Charles Pachter brings a playful irreverence to contemporary Canadian art. His best-known subjects include his barn, Toronto streetcar, and moose-and-Queen series, though his depictions of the Canadian flag remain among his most recognizable and iconic works.
Pachter’s first exhibition featuring Canadian flag motifs, The Painted Flag, opened on November 7, 1981, one day after Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau announced that the Canadian constitution was being repatriated. The show featured thirty large canvases in the artist’s newly renovated four-storey private commercial gallery on Queen Street in Toronto. The artist remembered his initial inspiration behind the series came to him one summer night when he “built a flag-pole out of two-by-fours nailed together, attached a small rayon flag to the top, and maneuvered the flimsy mast into a fencepost hole. As the sun was setting, I lay down in a hammock to watch the flag undulate slowly in the breeze, rocking back and forth like a primitive mobile.”
Margaret Atwood, the novelist and a childhood friend of Pachter, explains: “Pachter’s conscious exploration of the visual symbolism that surrounded him began, long before the ascendancy of Andy Warhol, when as a teenager he painted the landscape from a two-dollar bill on his bedroom wall, much to the bewilderment of his mother… Since that time, in a career which has now lasted three decades, Pachter has continued vigorously to explore his several media, to diversify his imagery, and to structure and restructure his visual world. In doing so he has restructured the world around him, and has changed profoundly the way we look at our own familiar iconography, even our own banalities… His is a sophisticated art which draws upon many techniques and evokes many echoes, yet it remains strongly individual, and firmly rooted in a ground which Pachter has both excavated and cultivated himself.”
