AANFM RCA
1925 - 2002
Canadian
Lifestream
oil on canvas
signed and dated 1958
50 x 58 1/2 in, 127 x 148.6 cm
Estimate: $25,000 - $35,000 CAD
Sold for: $25,000
Preview at: Heffel Toronto – 13 Hazelton Ave
PROVENANCE
Private Collection, Toronto
LITERATURE
Lenore Crawford, “Ewen’s Life Stream Art on Display at City Museums,” London Free Press, September 9, 1969, page 41
Matthew Teitelbaum, Paterson Ewen: The Montreal Years, Mendel Art Gallery, 1987, page 24
In 1958 Paterson Ewen was living in Montreal, in the milieu of that city’s vital abstract painting community, where the Automatists and the Plasticiens were a dominant influence. Although he was inspired by their explorations of abstraction, Ewen was not formally tied to these groups. Ewen’s Lifestream series demonstrated a shift from his previous abstract work, and as Matthew Teitelbaum observed, “At the time of their exhibition, and afterward, the Lifestream works were categorized, in the hybrid ground between gesture and geometric form, as lyrical abstractions.” In this series, bands of flattened colour traversed the canvas horizontally across colour fields painted in a brushy, scumbled manner. Soft edges and irregular forms echoed organic growth, and the Lifestream works suggest naturalistic sources – the shapes and movement of landscape. In a review of his work in 1969, Ewen revealed that contained in this series was his belief that a life stream or life force flows through all nature like an electric current. In Lifestream, an outstanding work from this series, the two circular motifs interject themselves into the horizontal flow, asserting their presence against the richly coloured bands and softly glowing ground.
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