Joyce Zemans. Jock Macdonald. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1985.

[transcription of excerpt]



Macdonald's dwindling fortunes and his growing desire to get closer to nature, which he believed was the basis for all important art, led him, with his wife and daughter, to Nootka, an Indian village on the west coast of Vancouver Island. They occupied an abandoned cabin several miles from the main Indian community. For a year and a half, they lived close to the sea, relying on it heavily for food. In favourable weather, they travelled by boat to the Nootka village to pick up mail and supplies and to visit friends who kept the lighthouse there.

In the highly stylized and autobiographical Pacific Ocean Experience (pl. 9), also titled Myself in a Nine Foot Boat, the artist is seen from above, rowing through the swelling waves. Whales leap about in the upper right-hand corner; in the centre, the artist is contained in a protective mandala of waves, while the sea surges about him. The smallness of the figure emphasizes its isolation, but the strange vantage point emphasizes that he is protected in the womb of nature.

In 1935, at Nootka, Macdonald painted Departing Day (pl. 10), which may have been the first of a group of semi-abstract paintings he called "thought-expressions." (John Vanderpant used similar words to describe his close-up photographs of natural objects; the term likely comes from theosophy.) Each of these works treats an aspect of nature: a cosmic event (Etheric Form, pl. 11), the seasons (Fall, pl. 14, Winter, p1. 16, Birth of Spring, pl. 18, Spring Awakening), or the mood generated by observing a particular natural phenomenon (Rain, The Wave, p1. 17, May Morning). "[I] put down in paint, in a concrete form, my feelings about the sea, wind, rain, etc. — feelings which had nothing to do with the visual effects of seas, windstorms and rainstorms. The feelings must have been something similar to those which brought Cézanne to the awareness that the 'life energy of a tree does not end at the visual limitation of the tree's silhouette form.' [In a similar way,] I felt that the curve of a wave, the breaker on the beach and the foam on the sand wasn't all of sea. "

These "thought-expressions" or "modalities," as he would later call them, resulted from Macdonald's belief that abstraction was the necessary expression for a contemporary artist. During his stay in Nootka, he resolved to move toward complete abstraction. In 1937, he wrote:

My time in Nootka has provided me with a new expression (which is only yet being born) which belongs to no school or already seen expression. To fail to follow through the force which is driving me would be destruction to my soul.

To accomplish his goal, "his experiments required him to live with nature and to be in touch with himself."

Such luxury was not to be his. A back injury forced him to return to the economic difficulties of life in Vancouver. Unsure of the reception abstract art would receive there, Macdonald vowed to keep his experiments to himself, and emphasized instead a series of landscape paintings of Indian life at Nootka. In four major paintings, stylized and strong in colour, Macdonald attempted to imbue landscape with the inspiration of his "thought-expressions" and with the mys-

tical relationship he had discovered between the Nootka people and nature.

The earliest of these paintings, Friendly Cove, Nootka Sound of 1935, in a private collection, highlights the powerful totemic image that dominated the inlet. Indian Burial, Nootka of 1937 (pl. 12), is rigidly symmetrical: crosses lean awkwardly into the centre of the painting, drawing the viewer into the composition. The vivid blue of the sea and the strong perspectival reduction force the eye to the surface of the canvas again. The bright colours and stylized forms of these paintings synthesize the artist's experience in a boldly formalized and decorative manner.

In 1938, two years after his return from Nootka, Macdonald painted Drying Herring Roe (pl. 15). In a letter accompanying the painting to the National Gallery in Ottawa, he described at length the Indian custom of submerging huge logs to catch the herring roe and then hanging the roe, looking like brilliant yellow "foliage," to dry and cure in the sun. "I believe it to be the best picture I ever painted, typically west coast, much purer in colour and direct in composition. " Macdonald was thrilled when the painting was selected for the "Century of Canadian Art" exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London in the fall of 1938.

In 1939, Macdonald, Charles Comfort, Lilias Farley, and others were commissioned to decorate the new Hotel Vancouver. Macdonald was to do a large mural for the dining room and chose for his theme a composite study of the Nootka landscape. The mural format gave him a unique opportunity to synthesize his feelings about landscape painting and abstraction. "Cubist-futurist" in style, the mural integrates the spirit of the Nootka landscapes and the abstract modalities that had become his private obsession.

(See fig. 3.)

12

Indian Burial, Nootka   1937
Oil on canvas
92.6 x 71.9 cm
Vancouver Art Gallery
Purchased 1938