Inventory # PCRE-08003-0001

PROVENANCE
Dorothy Cameron Gallery Ltd., Toronto
Corporate Collection, Toronto

Born in northern Scotland in 1897, Jock Macdonald served in WWI prior to studying art in Edinburgh. He held various teaching positions in the UK, before moving to Canada in 1926 to assume the head of design position at the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts (now Emily Carr University of Art + Design). In the three decades following, Macdonald’s vocation as an educator and mentor, coupled with a committed interest in aesthetic theory and the avant-garde, would take him across Canada and abroad. He taught in Vancouver, Victoria, Calgary, Banff and Toronto, all the while developing on his own artistic path. Just prior to his passing, the Art Gallery of Ontario held a retrospective of Macdonald’s work, their first for a living artist who was not a member of the Group of Seven.

After arriving in Canada, he actively explored British Columbia, and went on painting expeditions with Frederick Varley. He quickly proved himself an adept modernist painter of the Canadian landscape. Macdonald’s initial forays into abstraction began in the mid-1930s. Influenced by Lawren Harris’s theosophical writings, Macdonald sought a more abstract expression of the spiritual, immaterial aspect of nature. In the 1940s, he studied automatic processes under British surrealists Dr. Grace Pailthorpe and Reuben Mednikoff, and experimented with new media under American Hans Hofmann. In 1954, Macdonald became a founding member of the Painters Eleven, a group of Toronto-based artists committed to the promotion of abstract art. He would continue to experiment with media such as lucite and Duco, and with varying degrees of non-objective abstraction until his death in 1960.

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