Ewen, Paterson (1925-2002) Laurentians (1948) Description: Watercolour signed lower right Ewen/48 Dimension (PO): 11" x 14 3/4" Dimension (CM): 27 x 36 cm Condition report: Upon request, We will gladly answer all your inquiries in a detailed manner.
ARTIST: William Paterson Ewen (Canadian, 1925 - 2002) NAME: Landscape MEDIUM: oil on board CONDITION: Very good. No visible inpaint under UV light. SIGHT SIZE: 8 x 10 inches / 20 x 25 cm FRAME SIZE: 11 x 13 inches / 28 x 33 cm SIGNATURE: Lower right SIMILAR ARTISTS: Henrietta Mabel May, Sorel Etrog, Paul Peel, David Brown Milne, Guido Molinari, Marc-Aurele Fortin, Maud Lewis, John Graham Coughtry, Cornelius David Krieghoff, Lucius Richard LR O'Brien, James Edward Hervey MacDonald, Lise Gervais, Fritz Friedrich Wilhelm Brandtner, Jack Hamilton Bush, Ronald Langley Bloore, Frank Franz Hans Johnston CATEGORY: antique vintage painting SKU#: 116451 WARRANTY: 7 days returns accepted if item doesn't match description US Shipping $42 + insurance. William Paterson Ewen (Canadian, 1925 - 2002) Paterson Ewen was a painter, printmaker and educator. He was born in Montreal, Quebec and died in London, Ontario where he had lived since 1968. His most famous works are large (e.g. 8' X 12') acrylics and collages on gouged (using router or chisel) plywood. He has also worked on more traditional supports like canvas and paper using oil, watercolor, gouache, crayon, pastel, graphite, Japanese ink, felt pen, and lithography. His most famous subjects are natural phenomena which include astronomical objects like suns, moons, comets, galaxies and meteorological events like falling rain, thunder clouds, lightning strikes. He refers to these as "phenomenascapes". His other subjects include landscapes, figures, social commentary, color, shape and texture. His styles evolved through the decades from expressionist landscapes to Abstract Expressionism, Automatism, Hard Edge abstraction, and finally to his signature version of Fauvism. His art education included studies under John Lyman at McGill University, Montreal (1946 -1947) and under Arthur Lismer, Goodridge Roberts, William Walton Armstrong, Marian Scott, and Jacques de Tonnancour (see all teachers in AskART) at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts School of Art and Design (1948 - 1950). He taught at the Visual Arts Department of the University of Western Ontario, London from 1972 to 1988. He also taught summers at Banff School of Fine Arts, Alberta (1976); and at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, Halifax (1977). His close associates through the years have included Montreal artists Guido Molinari and Claude Tousignant; and London Ontario artists Greg Curnoe, Jack Chambers and David Rabinowitch. He was a co-founder of the Non-Figurative Artists' Association of Montreal (1956, President 1960) and elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (1975). During World War II he served with the Canadian Army infantry in the Netherlands (1943 - 1946). Of special note, in 1958 he was one of the 10 Quebec painters who exhibited with the Painters Eleven at the Park Gallery, Toronto. It was the only time P11 had a joint show with the avant-garde artists of French Canada. Some of the other artists included were Jean-Paul Riopelle, Paul Borduas and Alfred Pellan. His works are avidly collected. They are also in numerous public collections including the Art Gallery of Hamilton (Ontario), the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum London, the Kitchener - Waterloo Art Gallery (Ontario), Brandeis University (Massachusetts), the Amsterdam Civic Museum (Netherlands), the Museum of Quebec (Quebec City), the Winnipeg Art Gallery (Manitoba), and the Art Gallery of Windsor (Ontario). The National Gallery of Canada has 18 Ewen works in its permanent collection. The Art Gallery of Ontario is the home of the Paterson Ewen Archives and a study center for scholars of his work. Ewen's masterwork, Halley's Comet as seen by Giotto was one of the listed highlights when the new Art Gallery of Ontario opened on November 14, 2008. Among his awards and honors are three honorary doctorates. The University of Western Ontario, London, also named him Professor Emeritus. He is listed in A Dictionary of Canadian Artists (1974), by Colin S. MacDonald; in The Collector's Dictionary of Canadian Artists at Auction (2001), by Anthony R. Westbridge and Diana L. Bodnar; and in Art and Architecture in Canada (1991), by Loren R. Lerner and Mary F. Williamson. He and his work are discussed in most books about Canadian art history and modern art in Canada. There is also the book Paterson Ewen (1996), editor Matthew Teitelbaum, published by Douglas & McIntyre and the Art Gallery of Ontario in conjunction with the 1996 retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
WILLIAM PATERSON EWEN 1925 - 2002 LINEAR FIGURE ON PATTERNED GROUND c. 1965 titled on the stretcher and on a gallery label on the reverse oil on canvas 61.6 by 45.7 cm. 24 ¼ by 18 in.
WILLIAM PATERSON EWEN 1925 - 2002 MACHINE CLOUD 2 signed and titled on a label and No. E.18 on the reverse watercolour on card 36.8 by 45.1 cm. 14 ½ by 17 ¾ in.
William Paterson Ewen 1925 - 2002 Canadian oil on canvas Untitled "27 x 30 inches 68.6 x 76.2 centimeters signed and dated 1956 Literature:Matthew Teitelbaum, Paterson Ewen: The Montreal Years, Mendel Art Gallery, 1987, page 20, reproduced page 38 Provenance:By descent to the present Private Collection, Connecticut Exhibited:Parma Gallery, New York, Modern Canadian Painters, 1956 Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon, Paterson Ewen: The Montreal Years, November 20, 1987 - January 3, 1988, traveling to the London Regional Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Windsor, Concordia Art Gallery, Montreal and St. Mary's University Art Gallery, Halifax, 1988 During the time of strongly polarized philosophical and aesthetic battles that raged within the Quebec art scene during the late forties and early fifties, Paterson Ewen was blessed with strong connections to both the English and French artistic communities and the various groups that were active at that time. From his earliest days as an art student und r the influence of progressive representational artists like Goodridge Roberts, to his membership in the Association des artistes non-figuratifs de Montréal and his awareness of the Automatist and Plasticien groups, he absorbed their many philosophies and visual strategies without becoming defined by any one of them. It was in 1954 that he first began to show abstract works, and by 1956, when this painting was produced, he had developed his own philosophy and approach to abstraction. Ewen stated, "I'm trying to use the knowledge I've acquired to create a painting as original - as personal - as possible, that will express a point of view in terms of plastic discovery and will have an artistic order. I've chosen this direction because I feel the basic values of all painting are non-figurative." "
William Paterson Ewen 1925 - 2002 Canadian oil on canvas Abstract 12 x 16 inches 30.5 x 40.6 centimeters on verso signed Provenance:Acquired directly from the Artist in Montreal by the present Private Collection, London, England In Montreal in the early 1950s, Ewen's work was influenced by the new world of abstraction opened up by the Automatists, with their championing of freedom of gesture and the unconscious, and moved from figurative into abstract work. Through his wife Françoise Sullivan, Ewen met Automatist artists Jean-Paul Mousseau and Claude Gauvreau, who supported him. He was singular in the English-Canadian artistic community in gaining the respect and admiration of his French-Canadian peers, even though he did not formally join either the Automatists or the Plasticiens. In 1955, his abstract works received recognition in one of the most important exhibitions of the decade - Espace 55, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
William Paterson Ewen 1925 - 2002 Canadian acrylic on gouged plywood Full Circle Flag Effect 96 x 132 1/4 inches 243.8 x 335.9 centimeters on verso titled on the Carmen Lamanna Gallery label, the Art Bank label, the Art Cologne label and the Art Gallery of Ontario label and inscribed with the Canada Council Art Bank Inventory number ""ABBA #76/7 - 0104"" and ""Ewen Paterson"" Literature:Doris Shadbolt, Paterson Ewen: Recent Works, The Vancouver Art Gallery, 1977, reproduced, unpaginated Art Cologne Catalogue 20, Internationaler Kunstmarkt, 1986 Philip Monk, Paterson Ewen, Phenomena: Paintings 1971 - 1987, Art Gallery of Ontario, 1987, reproduced page 63 Matthew Teitelbaum, editor, Paterson Ewen, 1996, page 90 Provenance:Carmen Lamanna Gallery, Toronto Canada Council Art Bank Re-acquired by the Artist from the above Private Collection, Vancouver, 1986 Exhibited:Carmen Lamanna Gallery, Toronto, November 30 - December 19, 1974 The Vancouver Art Gallery, Paterson Ewen: Recent Works, May 13 - June 5, 1977 Art Gallery of Peterborough, June 4 - August 21, 1979 Multicultural Television Workshops, Toronto, September 17, 1979 - February 24, 1983 Art Space, Peterborough, October 8 - December 10, 1985 Expo 86, Vancouver, Commissioner General's Office, March 10 - November 3, 1986 Cologne Art Fair, Germany, Canada as the featured country, a curated exhibition with Paterson Ewen, Rodney Graham, Guido Molinari, Michael Snow, Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace, November 13 - 19, 1986 Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Paterson Ewen, Phenomena: Paintings 1971 - 1987, January 22 - April 3, 1988, traveling to the London Regional Art Gallery, Ontario, the Vancouver Art Gallery, Dalhousie Art Gallery, Halifax, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa and the Glenbow Museum, Calgary, 1988 - 1990 In 1970 Paterson Ewen moved into a studio in London, Ontario. He had just been released from the hospital where he had been treated for serious depression and alcoholism and was attempting to start fresh. Until that time, his work had been created with brushes on canvas. In the London studio he began to experiment by dipping pieces of torn felt into paint, daubing them onto canvas, playing a bit with the medium, and then looking at it. The marks suggested to him the idea of objects in space, traces of rain and tracks of lightning, in which he had always been interested. Thus the phenomena works were born. He then scoured books on the science of natural phenomena, learning how lightning actually works, studying eclipses, waves, the sun and moon. He explored interpretations of these things at first on traditional canvas, and then gave up this surface for wood with other materials applied, including sheet metal. The first gouged plywood works were made in the summer of 1971, just after the receipt of a Canada Council grant had allowed him to take a leave of absence from his teaching position. He moved to Toronto and set up a studio there where, for the first time in his career, he was able to paint full time. Ewen's gouged plywood works are remarkable for their originality, intensity, size and their impact on the genre of landscape painting. Although his first works were hand-gouged, he soon acquired an electric router which made the work faster and more responsive, as if he was drawing on plywood. Weather, and the idea of falling rain, is a subject he explores in some depth in the great cycle of his paintings of 1973 and 1974, which includes Precipitation, 1973 and Coastal Trip, 1974 (both in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario), and the large, three-panel masterwork of this group, Full Circle Flag Effect. While he was certainly an established artist prior to their inception, the dramatic phenomena works brought Ewen clearly into the focus of the national and international art worlds, and he was chosen to be Canada's sole representative for the Venice Biennale in 1982. By the time of Full Circle Flag Effect, Ewen was laying sheets of plywood - the largest with as many as three sheets fused together - on sawhorses and kneeling in the middle of them with the router in hand. The sheer physicality of the making of the works is quite apparent when looking at them; and the strength of the artist's force of will seems to be present in the gouge marks, furthering the image's impact. Simply put, they are considered his best works, and the period of the early to mid-1970s is the best of the best. Museums were quick to purchase them, and as a result, most are now in permanent collections, with very few in private hands. Full Circle Flag Effect shows us the phenomenon of rain in its various states. It is a simple, natural happening, yet in the pattern of Ewen's gouges, rain becomes a symphony. Each action is presented to us so simply, one thing at a time, and is almost childlike or illustrative in its handling. Put together, we have the magic of weather. The work is more than abstract - it is almost map-like; we simply have to figure out the map's legend ourselves. There is an interesting contrast between what we are being told by Full Circle Flag Effect and what we see as we look at it. The complex phenomenon of rain is made simple in its presentation, while our own understanding of rain - rain felt on our faces when we are in it - is nothing like the painted and gouged image. Ewen has as much abstracted the idea of rain as he has his depiction of it. Broken into its simplest elemental process, water drops fall down and evaporate up. Yet on his painterly surface, the way he uses the natural roughness of the plywood, the simple, lighthearted beauty of the marks, and the violent gouges in the material, all combine to provide the rain with a sense of otherworldliness, an intangible spirituality that firmly links Ewen with the great Canadian landscape painters of 60 years prior, while adeptly moving forward. American painter Eric Fischl states, "In many ways Paterson Ewen's paintings were a natural expression of what is, I think, a profound Canadian experience: namely, nature and the painting of the landscape. Here was someone who, in the 1970s, found a way of reinvigorating that tradition in an authentic way by recalling the power of nature." Please note that the Paterson Ewen will be previewed at Heffel Gallery Vancouver from October 8 16, 2008 (the Vancouver Gallery is closed for Canadian Thanksgiving weekend from October 11 - 13). For full cataloguing, text and images, please click here.
William Paterson Ewen 1925 - 2002 Canadian oil on canvas Spaced Tree 33 x 20 1/4 inches 83.8 x 51.4 centimeters signed and dated 1958 and on verso signed and titled Literature:Matthew Teitelbaum, Paterson Ewen, Art Gallery of Ontario, 1996, pages 47 and 51 Provenance:Private Collection, Ontario Neither an Automatist nor a traditional landscape painter, Paterson Ewen was an artist who evades categorization. Matthew Teitelbaum explains that, in Montreal, Ewen was "displaced from the English community by his questioning of the conventions of traditional pictorialism, yet distanced from the Automatistes by reference to subject matter." Ewen showed his first abstract paintings in 1955 at the landmark exhibition Espace 55. This exhibition investigated the relationship between Automatism and Surrealism and suggested that the new trends in abstraction questioned the accidental and unconscious nature of automatic painting. Although Ewen's works were included in Espace 55, his paintings remained spectator to the debate. Despite his painterly qualities of visible brush-strokes and thick impasto, which linked him to the Montreal school of abstract painters, Ewen's works from the 1950s maintained their commitment to the visible world. As demonstrated in Ewen's vivid painting Spaced Tree from 1958, regardless of the abstract qualities of the work, the figurative qualities of the Canadian landscape remain evident. Teitelbaum states, "It was Ewen's circumstance in the abstract painting circles of late 1950s Montreal to find himself not so much late (as in behind), but rather between (as in unaffiliated), not so much a follower as an explorer."
