Sold for: $7,500

PROVENANCE
Estate of the Artist
Roberts Gallery, Toronto
Private Collection, Ontario
By descent to the present Private Collection, Ontario

EXHIBITED
Roberts Gallery, Toronto, Jock Macdonald, January 5 - 20, 1962

In the mid-1940s, Jock Macdonald began to experiment radically in both his style and materials. Enabled by the freedom and looseness of ink and watercolour, it’s during this period that he readily embraced the surrealist technique of automatism, drawing and painting without preconception and allowing images to emerge subconsciously. The resulting works, frequently recalling fanciful animals and abstract configurations, were some of Macdonald’s most expressive and dynamic images yet. Nature’s Geometry emerged from this period, and is notable for its hard edges, sharp linework, and deep black lozenges floating above airy, primordial colour.

In 1952, a year after this evocative watercolour was produced, Jock Macdonald’s work hung in the Canadian Abstract Exhibition, a foundational non-objective painting exhibition organized by Alexandra Luke at Adelaide House in Oshawa, touring to Toronto’s Hart House the following year. In 1954, the Abstract Expressionist group Painters Eleven, of which Macdonald and Luke were key members, held its first gallery exhibition at Toronto’s Roberts Gallery at 641 Yonge Street. The show was arranged by fellow Painters Eleven member Jack Bush, whose dealer was a young Jack Wildridge, then at the beginning of his impressive career as the gallery’s director. The exhibition led to a similar business relationship between MacDonald and Wildridge, and by 1960, preparations for a major solo exhibition were under way. Plans were sidetracked, however, when Macdonald died suddenly and unexpectedly in December of that year. His planned one-artist show transformed into a major memorial exhibition held in 1962 comprised of over 80 works, including this important and expressive watercolour.

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