Joyce Zemans. Jock Macdonald: The Inner Landscape. Toronto: Art Gallery of Toronto, 1981.

[transcription of excerpt]



The Macdonalds had intended to stay two years in Nootka but in the fall of 1936, after only fifteen months, they returned to Vancouver. A troublesome back injury discouraged Macdonald from spending another winter in Nootka, "fell[ing] trees, buck[ing] logs and pack[ing] supplies." Before departing for Vancouver, Macdonald and his family visited the lighthouse by the Friendly Cove settlement where they assisted the lighthouse keeper; this respite provided not only an interesting challenge of scene and closer contact with Friendly Cove but also enabled Macdonald to obtain new subjects for future work.

Barbara Macdonald suggests that her husband was not overly distressed at the prospect of returning to Vancouver, for "he liked the art world and liked people." But the transition proved less carefree than he might have wished, for in the midst of the Depression jobs were scarce. The Macdonalds had left Vancouver with few funds and had subsisted on the land and the meagre returns from the pictures that were sold. Fortunately, Mrs. Bernulf Clegg, a friend and patron, offered the Macdonalds a comfortable home for a month, alleviating somewhat the immediate pressure to find work.

Although Macdonald was still mentally and spiritually absorbed with the artistic experiments he began in Nootka, his first concern was to find employment.

In spite of assistance he solicited from both Harry McCurry at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and A.Y. Jackson in Toronto, he was unable to secure a full-time teaching position. Ultimately he compromised and took a part-time job at the Canadian Institute of Associated Arts, a privately operated vocational art school that had opened a few months previously. At first he was optimistic; in December 1936, he wrote, "I am feeling my way with its possibilities and hope in time to again give some attention to the development of enthusiasm in art matters in this

city." By March 1937, however the wrote, "the school I am in now cannot possibly succeed and be worthwhile."

Since the job at the institute paid Macdonald only about forty dollars a month, he began also to give private instruction, often to former students of the British Columbia College of Arts. Many of his assignments echoed the interdisciplinary fervour of the old B.C. College. For Macdonald this teaching was rewarding since he used it to "enrich his own painting technique."

At the same time, Macdonald determined to paint works that represented his Nootka sojourn—landscapes he felt the public would accept—and to keep his thoughts on experimental work entirely to himself for the present. He approached his landscape painting with an almost missionary zeal. He wrote to John Varley, "Perhaps I am not worthy of carrying on the excellent work your father did in painting in Vancouver but I feel I may be better able to do so than any other here and I wish to do all I can to keep in the forefront of Canadian painting." In the landscape paintings done after his return to Vancouver, Macdonald abandoned the starkness of earlier landscapes for a new clarity of light and heightened colour values. His new paintings depicted his impressions of events or scenes observed at Nootka. Their primary stylistic characteristic is their uniformity of treatment: Macdonald ties his landscape to the surface by carefully articulating elements of the composition in patterns on the surface of the canvas. Landscape details are seen in relief against the dominant foreground motif. The compositions are more decorative in their imagery and in the overall patterning of the surface; yet, strange though it may seem, they are more timeless. By reorganizing elements of the scene in tightly knit hieratic compositions, Macdonald creates statements that, like his modalities, represent the essence of a scene or an event rather than any particular moment in space or time.

Shortly after his return from Nootka, Macdonald sold to his patron, Mrs. Clegg, the first of these large landscape paintings. In Friendly Cove, Nootka Sound, B.C. (1935), a formal dramatic style prevails. The curve of the bay in the background complements the strong vertical of the central totem pole. Reminiscent of Emily Carr's paintings, this work presents a compromise between Carr's descriptive Indian village scenes and her monumentally formalized paintings of the late twenties, in which a single image, extracted from the larger scene, dominates the composition. Macdonald also focuses on a powerful totemic image, but he maintains the descriptive, narrative elements surrounding it. Thus he establishes a tension between the synergized forces of nature and the central figure; the final result is one of dynamic symmetry.

In 1937, Macdonald complete another major landscape, Indian Burial, Nootka, purchased by the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1938. Based on the

Nootka years, the painting derives from a thumbnail sketch Macdonald made during his sojourn there. The work is striking in its organization. A number of fenced burial plots form the dominant central image. In the immediate foreground, mourners and a vivid mask surround a newly excavated grave. The priest, his hand raised, creates a strong vertical focus. As in all his major landscape paintings, Macdonald carefully controls the viewer's eye movement. In the centre foreground, a blue cross on the casket provides a complementary image for the two clearly defined, rigorously vertical crosses in the immediate centre of the middle ground. Despite the strongly recessive elements and the perspectival reduction in the size of the images, depth is counteracted by the strong patterning of the scene. Blues are complemented by the red and yellow chequerboard of the central grave. The composition displays a designer's delight in carefully balanced areas of colour. It is interesting to note how the organization and handling of this composition resembles Jean Paul Lemiuex's Lazare (1941), and one can but wonder if Lemieux had seen Macdonald's painting reproduced on the cover of the Vancouver Art Gallery Bulletin.

These were stressful years for Macdonald. In March 1937, he wrote to McCurry, again inquiring about job possibilities elsewhere in Canada and spoke of "ek[ing] out a near starvation existence." He found the Canadian Institute impossible and had decided that, if nothing better arose, he would abandon the institute and turn to private classes. He had "to earn money in order to live...the financial side of it has been hell and still is."

During this difficult period, a strange painting entitled Pilgrimage (1937) emerged; Macdonald said it came to him in a dream. The canvas is penetrated by descending rays of light; the trees arch to enclose the central pathway and create a natural sanctuary. In the foreground, boats are drawn up as if on a shore. It is obviously a forest glade, but

right:
Indian Burial, Nootka, 1937
Oil on canvas
92.6 x 71.9 cm
The Vancouver Art Gallery

above:
Sketch for Indian Burial at Nootka, c. 1935
Ink on paper with pencil grid laid on top
4 x 3 cm
Private Collection

the airless space and stylized images of nature suggest a dream world rather than the recollection of a specific scene. The mood of this painting must surely reflect Macdonald's longing to be out of the anguish that financial strain, ill health, and exhaustion had created in the year after his return from Nootka. Recognizing its anomalous position within his work, Macdonald wrote of this painting that it "might not be conservative enough" for a national exhibition.

Already burdened with physical and psychological frustrations, Macdonald suffered a collapsed lung in April 1937. Upon his recovery in the summer of 1937, the Macdonalds travelled to California. In San Francisco they spent a day at an exhibition, where he admired Cezanée's painting:

"Cézanne is undoubtedly a magnificent colourist, exact and sure, in a very mellow beauty and yet of rich purity. I was surprised to find how thinly he painted his landscapes and how exceedingly heavy the pigment was palette knifed on in his portraits."

In his Okanagan paintings of 1943, Macdonald would hearken back to Cézanne's landscapes for a vision more perfectly suited to this new terrain, and later he would speak of Cézanne's perfect understanding of the spirit that guides art.

In Los Angeles, Macdonald saw an exhibition of works by " the world's recognized leaders in modern art movement." The exhibition which included works by Picasso, Braque, Modigliani, Derain, Ernst, Kandsinsky, and Archipenko, was held in a private gallery and organized by two New York dealers. Having himself experimented with "modern expression," Macdonald submitted two of his own works for consideration and was encouraged by the favourable response he received.

In Pomona he saw an exhibition of work done by leading American artists during 1936, but

he observed that no single spirit informed that country's art, no "unity for a definite American Art." Such unity was something Macdonald identified with strongly, and at every opportunity he placed his own work clearly within the Canadian landscape school, naming Varley as his mentor and spiritual benefactor.

Macdonald considered moving south, but after weighing the relative advantages of the United States and Canada, he concluded that "British Columbia is the land of inspiration. British Columbia has that vapour quality that seems to me to be much more clairvoyant in its inspiration than that blazing and relentless sunshine down south! Canada is the land for artists to find the environment for true creative activity". He decided to remain in Canada and continue painting in the Canadian tradition established by Varley and the Group of Seven.

It is difficult to assess the exact impact of the California exhibitions on Macdonald. Landscape studies of the Okanagan in the forties suggest, in their handling of space and colour, that Macdonald was aware of Cézanne's St. Victoire studies.

Certainly he was impressed by the Cézannes he saw in San Francisco. It is less likely, however, that he was influenced much by the abstract works he saw. Macdonald had developed his abstract style several years before he visited California. In fact, he considered his own work comparable to that which he admired by distinguished Europeans. It is more than likely that the opportunity to see such works first-hand simply renewed his own commitment to abstraction.

After his return to Vancouver, Macdonald painted only one more Indian landscape, Drying Herring Roe (1938), which he considered to be "the best picture [he] ever painted. Typically west coast, much purer in colour [and] in directing composition."

Macdonald clearly felt a strong need to explicate in words the subject of Drying Herring

Roe. He worried that the painting would not be understood because of its unusual subject matter and the unfamiliar colour of the bleached herring roe. He explained the background of the canvas at some length:

"About the time the herring are due to spawn, the Indians cut long twenty foot branches from spruce and cedar trees, take them out in canoes to deep water close to headlands and sink them twenty feet in the water. In two weeks the branches are raised up, plastered with herring eggs. They are taken to the villages and hung up on wires, ropes, etc., to dry out and cure in the sun. The village festooned with masses of mimosa coloured (yellowish) hanging foliage...branches are taken down, the eggs shaken off and packed for winter food. Eggs are boiled before eating."

Emphatically structured, the work presents a clear pictorial statement of the Indian village as the artist remembered it. Colour values in it are even stronger than in previous works. Macdonald creates a decorative surface pattern with the roe, which integrates the foreground and the middle ground and links diverse compositional elements. It is not incidental that this work, like Friendly Cove and Indian Burial, was conceived in the studio and based remotely on sketches made outdoors in Nootka. Lighthouse at Nootka, on the other hand, was literally transcribed from an in situ water-colour. The naturalism of the latter work is replaced, in the Indian paintings, by a decorative composition in which Macdonald captures the spirit of Nootka and its life rather than accurately portraying a particular scene.

Drying Herring Roe completed, Macdonald determined to return to his greatest passion, and wrote "now I can get back to my modalities which are for me much more exciting than landscapes."