In 1967, Gershon Iskowitz received a Canada Council travel grant to fly to Churchill, Manitoba, following a suggestion by photographer John Reeves that his paintings carried an “aerial perspective.” From a helicopter, Iskowitz recognized in the scattered lakes, cloud formations and forest clusters of Northern Canada the motifs he had been working towards in his increasingly abstract painting practice. As Adele Freedman notes, based on extensive interviews with the artist, “He saw bright colours exploding through the layers of clouds, land masses breaking through atmospheric barriers, dramas enacted on epic scale by the protagonists—space, form, and colour.” He continued to travel to new northern destinations in the following years, sketching what he saw in his hotel rooms and then beginning large-scale canvases once back in his Spadina Street studio in Toronto.

Green Yellow Orange Painting, completed in 1974, is exemplary of the artist’s new expanded vision for his practice. After his 1972 exhibition representing Canada at the Venice Biennale, Iskowitz’s canvases became increasingly more confident. Through his precise juxtaposition of colour and form, they exuded the exhilarating sensation of viewing great Canadian landscapes from the skies above.

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