Gershon Iskowitz was born in 1921 in Kielce, Poland, a town in the west of the country with a small Jewish population. While he never received formal training as a child, his early aptitude for art was apparent, and by the time he was just nine years old he was producing movie posters for the local cinema, rendered quickly in watercolours and ink. The outbreak of World War II forced Iskowitz into a series of concentration camps. During the horrors of this period, he continued to produce sketches, recording the violence he saw on scraps of paper with scavenged stubs of pencils.

At the close of the war, he joined the Munich Academy, but was soon disillusioned by the academic traditionalism espoused by his teachers. Perhaps more influential was an introduction to Austrian Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka—a veteran of the Viennese avant-garde movements of the turn of the century and a talented colourist—as well as his exposure to the vibrant works of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Edvard Munch that hung in Munich galleries.

Throughout this early period, what emerged were twin driving factors: a unrepentant desire to depict only what he had seen (a visual experience, a memory, a reflection of what was in front of him) and a drive to relay the emotional capacity of those perceptual experiences through expressive colour and, increasingly, abstraction. Even his earliest works were defined by a heightened colouration or reduced distortions: dots or streaks to render faces in the 1940s, for instance, or landscapes becoming increasingly amplified by patches of colour by the 1950s. Throughout, he was guided by a sense of space and light that was rooted in his own perceptual experience: he never considered his paintings to be pure abstraction, but rather direct representations of what he had seen.

A 1967 trip to the Far North provided a critical breakthrough. Funded by a Canada Council grant, Iskowitz traveled to Churchill, Manitoba, located at the juncture of arctic tundra, boreal forest and the coastal inlets of Hudson Bay. Taking several flights in bush planes, Iskowitz was struck by the chromatic richness and sweeping sense of space that emerged from the overhead perspective: the vivid colours of the subarctic topologies, the sweep of a horizonless expanse, and the atmospheric verve of landscape breaking through the clouds. Several additional trips to the North followed, and each time Iskowitz returned with a renewed inspiration, creating larger canvases of ever more chromatic complexity and dynamic structure.

By the early 1980s, Iskowitz had perfected a sense of depth and light, and in 1981 he began to produce large canvases that could be considered nocturnes—conveying, in his own words, “a feeling of the night, a feeling of mystery, with lots of depth, unity, and composition.” In Violet – C, deep purple—a colour he began using in earnest following a 1977 trip to Yellowknife—dominates the field, floating at the upper surface as it remains bounded by the edges of the canvas. Brighter greens, oranges, yellow and blue emerge in disunified, amorphous breaks beneath and at the edges of this surface, rupturing the darker clouds in jeweled flashes. Hazier whites appear between the rich nighttime violets, giving the nocturnal cartography a further distinct sense of dimensionality. With its pulsating energy and expanding sense of space, Violet – C is among the strongest examples of Iskowitz’s late work—a moment of pure sensation, captured in paint.

This work was painted at a pivotal time of recognition for Iskowitz. In 1982, the year after it was completed, the Art Gallery of Ontario held a major retrospective of the artist’s work—a rare honour afforded to a living artist at that time. The same year saw the publication of Adele Freeman’s important monograph Gershon Iskowitz: Painter of Light.

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