Megan Bice. The Informing Spirit: Art of the American Southwest and West Coast Canada, 1925-1945. Kleinburg: McMichael Canadian Art Collection; Colorado Springs: Taylor Museum for Southwestern Studies, Colorado Springs Fine Art Center, 1994.

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A DESIGNER GOES WEST: J.W.G. (JOCK) MACDONALD

By answering a newspaper advertisement in his native Scotland, James Williamson Galloway Macdonald was hired as design instructor under C.H. Scott at the new Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts. Trained at a time when the traditions of William Morris and the styles of Art Nouveau were still strong influences, Macdonald appreciated the importance of nature as a source of inspiration. It was a concept that was to intrigue him, in altered and complex form, throughout his painting career.

Knowledgeable in the history and principles of symbols from around the world, Macdonald became equally intrigued by the Native cultures of his new surroundings, encouraging the use of legends as subjects for students and, in his own design work, adapting traditional decorative motifs. As well, he began to explore and draw the countryside around him. He started to paint, encouraged and instructed by Varley who he accompanied on sketching trips into the mountainous interior. At sixteen years Macdonald's senior, Varley was an important mentor to the young artist, integral to his move from designer to painter. A major early canvas, Black Tusk, Garibaldi Park, B.C. (cat. 74), combines a Group of Seven propensity for powerful landscape forms with an individual and dramatic sense of composition and paint handling. Works such as this gave Macdonald a place as a founding member of the Canadian Group of Painters.

As a teacher at the Vancouver School and then at the rebel B.C. College, Macdonald found himself at the centre of the lively Vancouver art scene. Although Varley was a profound influence, several other inventive personalities also had lasting impact. Macdonald attended the "musicales" at John Vanderpant's studio. An admirer of Vanderpant's work, he felt that the photographer "radiates personality," and, indeed, after Varley's departure from Vancouver in 1936, was "the only 'living' being" left in the city. As for many others, the energetic figure of Harry Täuber brought knowledge of European avant-garde philosophies and art styles. Macdonald also came to know Emily Carr, seeing her as "undoubtedly the first artist in the country and a genius without question." Writing in 1938 about her solo exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, he continued,

I feel in her work the first conscious expression of the rhythm of life, relating this rhythm to all nature, and definitely causing the observer of her work to be conscious of the fact that he or she is also related, even though there is no physical body represented.

Through friendship with Varley and Carr, and through Bertram Brooker's Yearbook of the Arts, Macdonald became acquainted with the ideas of Toronto's art circle. By 1932, his energies were clearly devoted to painting and the landscape, and he wrote to the National Gallery requesting various reproductions of works of art, "one or two of the older styles of landscape work," as well as the Canadian moderns—Varley, [Tom] Thomson, Jackson, Lismer, Clarence Gagnon, FitzGerald, [J.E.H.] MacDonald—and of Harris' recent, stylized works inspired by the North Shore of Lake Superior, the Rockies and the Arctic.

In such an environment, Macdonald's course headed increasingly toward an exploration of the spiritual revelation of nature. The surrounding mountains took on the mystical symbolism of the pyramid, "the Holy Mountain or High Place of God...the first Temple of the Mysteries, ...a repository of those sacred truths which are the certain foundation of all arts and sciences." In stating that "the unfolding of man's spiritual nature is as much an exact science as astronomy or medicine," Macdonald echoed the esoteric philosophies discussed by his colleagues. At the same time, like many of those philosophers, he was intrigued by the discoveries of science and mathematics.

In 1934, the artist began a series of experiments to enhance his understanding of colour. Setting up a still life, he concentrated on

a small section of the flowers. One of the results was Formative Colour Activity (cat. 75). As his "first automatic oil canvas," the painting was produced "in an ecstasy," leaving the artist "pale and exhausted but terribly exhilarated." Its format visually recalls and, perhaps, was instigated by Vanderpant's close-up photographic images of flowers and halved vegetables, an approach that he had been exploring for several years. In a passage that could also describe Vanderpant's beliefs, art historian Joyce Zemans has related the painting to Kandinsky and Ozenfant's ideas about subject matter removed from descriptive reference, stating that Macdonald "turned to the spirit of nature rather than to the representation of a specific image."

With the collapse of the B.C. College of Art in 1935, Macdonald and his family, in the company of Harry Täuber, retreated for a year to the remote west coast of Vancouver Island, settling near the small Native community of Friendly Cove, Nootka Sound. Living in an extremely simple way, in fact at a subsistence level, Macdonald felt very close to the elements of nature. He often remarked on the presence of the sea, which overwhelmingly replaced the presence of the mountains. Not long after arriving, Täuber wrote back to a former student. Although feeling the lack of comforts, he noted the nearby "interesting Indian settlement...with poles and

figure remains and a burial grotto," and remarked that there was "an ideal beauty in the natural environment out here, and most inspiring to deep thinking and dreaming about life reformations." He also commented on "eight Anthroposophical Magazines" that had been lent to him and several lectures he was preparing on "Man's Spiritual and Cultural Development." When in Europe, Täuber had thoroughly studied anthroposophy, even meeting its founder, Rudolf Steiner. At the B.C. College he had hoped that his lectures "on dimensions and consciousness" would better "give the key to a higher understanding, than by the ordinary three-dimensional outlook." Given their isolation and Macdonald's interest, it is difficult to imagine that the two men did not discuss such philosophical ideas. One of Steiner's theories held that "man is a citizen of three worlds."

Through his body he belongs to the world which he also perceives through his body; through his soul he constructs for himself his own world; through his spirit a world reveals itself to him which is exalted above both the others.

Steiner's three worlds and Macdonald's responsiveness to nature seem to be almost literally illustrated in sketches such as Pacific Ocean Experience (cat. 76).

In addition, like Täuber, Macdonald's attention was caught by the life of the neighbouring Native community. Perhaps, like many Europeans, the artist was fascinated by "exotic" North American indigenous society, but, as we have seen, he also deeply admired the work of Emily Carr, much of whose inspiration had come from Native peoples as well as the landscape of Vancouver Island. In fact, Friendly Cove was the site of Carr's 1929 canvas, Indian Church (cat. 47).

In the canvases of the late thirties, after his return to Vancouver, Macdonald developed themes discovered at Nootka. Canvases depicting Friendly Cove recognize the Natives' deep sense of relationship between nature and life, both spiritual and physical. In Indian Burial, Nootka of 1937 (cat. 71), traditional Native beliefs are represented by a single totemic gravemarker in the lower right corner, seemingly alone in a situation otherwise Christian. However, the crosses and the exaggerated compositional lines of the landscape lead the eye back to the far distance where the outstretched wings of leaning Thunderbird poles seem to create a vestigial arch over the scene. Given the subject matter, the spiritual is certainly a concern of Indian Burial, a preoccupation that the artist even dreamed about, resulting in the more abstracted and symbolic forms of Pilgrimage (cat. 77), whose title and composition recalls not only Christianity and a monastic cloister but pays homage to the great forest interiors of the Coast. The following year, Macdonald again depicted Friendly Cove, interestingly, in a style less abstracted than either of the earlier paintings. He was "quite convinced" that Drying Herring Roe (cat. 72) "is my best landscape by a long way." The decorative but strong design integrates a traditional totemic figure with a scene of everyday life. The diagonals of the village buildings, the beach and the suspended yellow branches create a dynamic and interlocked composition.

During his year on Nootka, Macdonald, while making small drawings and sketches of the Friendly Cove village, had also produced a series of panel paintings which he called "thought-expressions," a name reminiscent of Vanderpant's terminology and of theosophical "thought-forms." The symbolic Pacific Ocean Experience fits well within this description, as do other small paintings depicting planets and stars. In 1937, back in Vancouver, it was clear that Macdonald had discussed his work with Vanderpant. In a letter to H. 0. McCurry at the National Gallery, he wrote,

I think Vanderpant can tell you that I have been searching for a new expression in art and that my time at Nootka has provided me with a new expression (which is yet only being born) ... To

fail to follow through the force which is driving me—and which I clearly believe is a true creative art—would be destruction to my very soul.

The following year, Macdonaid again wrote to McCurry stating that "in my new experiments I have to live with nature, be in constant touch with its life force." The experiments were "semi-abstracts" called "modalities," a term "dug up from the dictionary," which meant " 'the expressions of thought in relation to nature'." Fall (cat. 78) has been compared to esoteric charts and to contemporary works by Lawren Harris, 2 and may well relate to Macdonald's own training in symbols and design. In addition to these more geometrical compositions, other abstracted works from the same period are more derivative of natural forms, have a freer handling, and convey a greater feeling of intuitive construction. In December of 1939, Macdonald wrote to McCurry commenting that the "degradation" of war "brought a feeling ... that the continued search for an understanding of life through art would be impossible." His solution was to move into a studio with an eastern light so that he could see the rising sun, "the life giver." The modalities "lift me out of the earthliness, the material mire, of our civilization . . . . I believe as definitely as ever that there can be no art with aesthetic values which has no contact with nature."

The war, however, had two positive outcomes for Macdonald. Lawren Harris had been living in the United States since 1934 but, in 1940, with his Canadian funds frozen, he left to take up residence in Vancouver. The two artists became close friends and began to sketch together in the interior mountains. Interestingly, both men seemed to need the direct contact with nature and Macdonald produced a number of representational mountain paintings between 1939 and 1944. Undeniably, however, Castle Towers, Garibaldi Park of 1943 (cat. 73), carries high-keyed emotional overtones in its clarity and low horizon line, opening above into an expansive, ethereal blue sky. Throughout, Macdonald continued to contemplate the abstract; the pull between that route and representation must have been understood by Harris. No doubt, the two shared ideas about the relationship of the physical to the ideal, in particular "the fourth dimension" which had fascinated both for some time. Macdonald reported in 1943, that although he was painting landscape, he found, "my semi-abstracts, or what I name 'Modalities,' a deeper value to me." They contained "a nature form in extension," which was the same as saying the 4th dimension is an extension of the third dimension; ...And the awakening of a new consciousness will arise out of the new knowledge,from the slow understanding, of the 4th dimension. For me, abstract and semi-abstract creations of pure idiom, are statements of the new awakening consciousness.

The second benefit of the war was the timely 1943 arrival in Vancouver of the British Surrealist painter, Grace Pailthorpe. Wartime had brought a number of surrealist writers and painters to North America, particularly to New York, with results that reverberated in the development of Abstract Expressionism. Pailthorpe, a medical doctor and Freudian analyst, and a friend of the art critic and historian, Herbert Read, had explored automatic painting as an art form revelatory of the subconscious. Macdonald's search to depict "inner consciousness" and the essence of nature must have responded immediately to Pailthorpe's approach. As the artist himself had observed in 1940:

Do we limit nature to our visual perceptions or are we to extend our conception of Nature to include the whole universe. Art is not found in the mere imitation of nature, but the artist does perceive through his study of nature the awareness of a force which is the one order to which the whole universe conforms. Art in all its various activities is trying to tell us something, some–

thing about nature, something about the universe, and something about life.

... The laws of nature are also written within us. They are part of the essence of our minds....Intuitively artists create within the structural forms of nature.

Pailthorpe's methods were a catalyst for Macdonald's early experiments with automatist watercolours (fig. 16).


Jock Macdonald left Vancouver in 1946 to take a teaching position in Calgary. He soon moved on to Toronto where he became an influential teacher and colleague of a rising generation of artists, Painters Eleven, who were exploring the new possibilities of abstract expressionism. Macdonald's later paintings, stained, rubbed and brushed abstracts, helped pave the road to these developments in eastern Canada. The automatist watercolours had been a new direction, opening a way for the analogous depiction of nature's essence—a natural human act reflective of Nature's forms. It was a journey initiated in the landscape and art community of the West Coast, transformed but never losing sight of the microcosmic and monumental wonders of nature.

71. Indian Burial, Nootka, 1937