PROVENANCE
Estate of O.J. Firestone, Ottawa
Important Canadian Art, Sotheby’s Canada in association with Ritchie’s, May 26, 2008, lot 64
The Collection of Torben V. Kristiansen, Vancouver

LITERATURE
B.C. Binning: A Retrospective, UBC Fine Arts Gallery, 1973, titled as Theme Painting, No. 3, reproduced page 29 and listed page 35

EXHIBITED
UBC Fine Arts Gallery, Vancouver, B.C. Binning: A Retrospective, March 13 – 31, 1973, catalogue #38

Bertram Charles Binning was one of the most important figures in the history of modernist painting in British Columbia. Born in Alberta in 1909, Binning moved to Vancouver, where he attended the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts (now Emily Carr University of Art + Design), graduating in 1932. After working as a teacher at his alma mater, Binning left to teach at the University of British Columbia in 1949. Initially he worked in the Department of Architecture and later, in 1955, helped to establish and headed the Department of Fine Arts (now the Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory). By this time Binning’s work, although based in realism, was strongly abstracted. He painted images that emphasize both his sure sense of design and his command of colour, line and form.

Theme Painting is a fine example of Binning’s skills with design and colour. It also shows his ability to use the fairly intransigent surface of the unprimed burlap to his advantage. One of the most striking elements of this image is Binning’s willingness to work in a way that seems to deny the precision of his geometric forms. The shifting pattern of his forms provides the whole surface of Theme Painting with a notable sense of animation. The visual vibrancy is seen in the various shapes that occur across the whole canvas.

The work contains only four paint colours—yellow, black, white, red. Binning also used the unprimed surface of the burlap itself as a secondary colour element. Despite this relative lack of colour, the composition, as a whole, has a lively and striking sense of rhythm. Take, for example, Binning’s use of black and white. He has used only these colours in three vertical columns spread across the composition: one slightly to the left of centre, one centrally in the right half of the composition, and a simpler column at the right edge of the work. A careful examination of these elements reveals that Binning never repeated himself—the circular forms within his black and white elements are never the same, and the lowest black forms are not even circular. In other words, the apparent symmetry of the composition is an illusion. It is this variety of shapes and the use of idiosyncratic line that give the whole composition visual vibrancy. The painting, despite the apparently static geometries, is never still. Like the surface of Binning’s beloved ocean, this composition always seems to be moving.

When Binning began to show his paintings in the late forties, he claimed an unusual territory in Canadian art. He produced paintings that are characterized by an exceptional sense of composition, a sure command of colour and a wonderful sense of visual delight.

Finally, it should be noted that the inscriptions on the stretcher are all by Binning himself.

We thank Ian M. Thom, Senior Curator—Historical at the Vancouver Art Gallery from 1988 to 2018, for contributing the above essay. Thom is the co-author of B.C. Binning, published in 2006.

For the biography on Torben V. Kristiansen in PDF format, please click here.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars