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Robert Amos: Son of the soil a master of abstraction

In 1972, I was an art student at York University in Toronto. My painting teachers were Doug Morton (of the famous Regina Five) and David Bolduc, a leading Toronto painter of large abstracts.
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The William Perehudoff installation in the Winchester Modern gallery presents 26 original paintings.

In 1972, I was an art student at York University in Toronto. My painting teachers were Doug Morton (of the famous Regina Five) and David Bolduc, a leading Toronto painter of large abstracts.

Bolduc took our class to the David Mirvish Gallery downtown, which on the outside appeared to be a traditional brick house in an older neighbourhood. Inside, we found the building had been gutted, leaving one huge room for the display of one huge painting by the American Jules Olitski. Mirvish was dedicated to Colour Field Abstraction.

This was the ultimate moment of abstraction. You’ll recall how Jackson Pollock swept representation away in the late 1940s; then Mark Rothko did away with expression; and Frank Stella did away with gesture; and in the end his geometry gave way to minimalism. Giant canvases with a few cryptic marks commanded astronomical prices and were explained in abstruse theories by New York critics. And then Pop Art blew it all away.

At the time, I rebelled against my teachers and took up with the new art — video, mail art, performance and the rest. “Post-painterly Abstraction” would have remained dead to me, but for the efforts of Winchester Galleries.

Through contact with artists of an older generation, and their estates, Winchester has brought us Quebec’s Riopelle, Tousignant, McEwen and Gagnon. They have brought us Toronto’s Roy Mead, Graham Coughtry and — soon — Harold Town. It might come as a surprise to find that Saskatchewan was a hotbed of that late phase of abstraction, with close ties to New York.

The crucial factor was the Emma Lake School, which began as a summer camp for artists on a rural Saskatchewan lake. Visiting teachers, mostly acclaimed members of the New York vanguard, brought urban insights to northern Saskatchewan — Herman Cherry (1961), Kenneth Noland (1963), Clement Greenberg (1962), Jules Olitski (1964) and Frank Stella (1967). Among them, as a student and participant, was a man from Saskatoon named William Perehudoff.

Perehudoff (1918-2013) was the child of Doukhobor parents, and tilled the family farm for most of his life. He also decided early on to become an artist of international renown. During his early years he worked through just about every art style in the western world, eventually as a student of Amedee Ozenfant in New York (1950-51). And to support himself, he worked as a commercial artist (1954-1978).

It was his meeting with the Emma Lake masters, especially critic Clement Greenberg, that led to his abrupt and permanent shift to non-objective abstraction.

Perehudoff was a laconic son of the soil, a man of few words. In the large volume published by Mendel Gallery in Saskatoon in 2011, Robert Christie explains that “he never expounded on art issues or theories, and his comments in the studio were usually limited to whether he thought the work was good or not, or if it was finished.” When asked about why he persisted in farming, Perehudoff replied: “You have to have something to do while you’re waiting for the paint to dry.”

Despite the ever-present horizon of Saskatchewan outside the home he shared with his wife, painter Dorothy Knowles, Perehudoff’s stripes are not to be interpreted as landscape elements, and his vertical lines are not to be considered as people.

“Why do you have to get it?” the artist said. “Why do you have to understand it?” I guess you could just say the paintings are something to look at.

Karen Wilkin, lifelong champion of late modernism, describes this artist’s work more fulsomely, as “self-evident autonomous constructions in the language of paint.” She days they are “deliberately detached from explicit reference. Their aim is plainly not to replicate appearances but rather to stir our emotions through wordless relationships of colour, eloquent intervals, thoughtfully deployed shapes and nuanced surfaces.”

The show at Winchester Modern presents 26 original paintings, provided by the estate of the artist. Regrettably, there is far too much in the room for a proper appreciation of the subtleties of each work, and if you intend to take one of the larger pieces home you’ll need a big empty wall to receive it. That said, this is a good survey of the last 30 years of Perehudoff’s work, and you really do need to see these pieces “in the flesh” to calculate their effect.

Effect is what it’s all about. The artist tuned up his colours to concert pitch. As he said: “Let the colour come alive.” He was also fully engaged with the composition of the forms he created.

“If it has no structure, it’s not going to last. You need to simplify all the confusion. That’s what makes art.” Typically, he soaked his canvas with a varied wash of acrylic paint and laid simple forms on top, using opaque colours chosen “to create delicate, enlivening imbalances,” according to Wilkin. He resisted what he called “good design” or obviously resolved structures.

In the earliest works, short, thick brush marks are lined up like notes on the piano, their colours relating to each other with a clear analogy to music. With the invention of thick acrylic gel, he began to add texture to the marks. This led to the use of sweeps of viscous paint, creating a tonal graduation in each mark. In his later years, Perehudoff moved to a clear geometry, cutting the edge of his forms with masking tape and stacking the resulting shapes in a manner reminiscent of Kazemir Malevich, the Russian Suprematist.

But hey — I’m falling into the trap of explaining what is simply a visual generator of emotion. So go, have a look and take from it what you will. This is the real thing.

 

William Perehudoff at Winchester Modern, 758 Humboldt St., 250-386-7750 or 250-386-2773 until April 26.