The butterfly is perhaps the most central and recognized motif in Jack Shadbolt’s entire body of work. To Shadbolt, it embodied the delicate beauty of the natural world and its cycles of life and death, while at the same time symbolizing the act of transfigurative rebirth. The palette he chooses for this work is dynamic – hot yellows and oranges a atop a field and sky of warm purples and maroons. Through this, its as though he seeks to express the unstoppable and surging energy of nature, present even in its most ephemeral forms. His gestural handling of paint is also very significant, adding to the image’s vigorous presence while at the same time positioning it between his oscillating engagements with representation and abstraction. Begun in 1963, this work was produced in the years just preceding his 1969 retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada, organized by Anthony Emery, director of the Vancouver Art Gallery. This major travelling exhibition reignited Shadbolt’s career and cemented his status as a central figure in the Vancouver School of Post-War Canadian Art. Much like the butterfly, this painting underwent an extended period of metamorphosis: Shadbolt would revisit the painting through the following decades, changing the title several times, before finalizing the work in 1997.