Vancouver: Art And Artists 1931-1983. Vancouver: The Vancouver Art Gallery, 1983.

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The Macdonalds, with Harry Täber and Les Planta, moved to Nootka, on Vancouver Island. Macdonald had grown more interested in interpreting concepts of nature beyond external representation. He became familiar with the writings of Ozenfant and Blavatsky, and of theosophists Jeans, Kinkowski, and Peter Ouspensky and his time and space theories. In Tertium Organum, Ouspensky stressed that the noumenal world could not be comprehended in the same way as the phenomenal world. During the early thirties in Vancouver, the search for unity and external or cosmic reality was through philosophical and religious concerns—a goal that Macdonald established for his art. As early as 1934 he had painted Formative Color Activity, which he later referred to as

"automatic" painting. The isolated environment at Nootka encouraged a return to these earlier concerns and he experimented with what he called "thought expressions" or "modalities." Each of these works was about some aspect of nature: a cosmic event, the seasons, a mood. Unlike his later "automatic" work (and Kandinsky's 1914 Abstraction, which appears similar), Macdonald's "modalities" never abandoned a reference to nature.

Ill, and short of money, he returned to Vancouver in November 1936, to suffer a collapsed lung the following year. The Vancouver Art Gallery's purchase of Indian Burial, Nootka (1937) brought some respite; the Macdonalds broke out of Vancouver isolation with a trip to California. In San Francisco, Macdonald admired Cézanne's paintings (their influence appears in his Okanagan landscapes of 1943) and, in Los Angeles, works by Picasso, Ernst, Kandinsky, Braque, and Archipenko. Back in Canada, he returned to teaching, developing a strong and loyal following in the arts community. The "modalities" developed at Nootka were to remain his chief concern during the last year of the decade. Not only had he been offered showings on his California trip, but the Vancouver public was attending his exhibitions and lectures on abstraction in increasing numbers. In a letter to Harry McClurry (July 22, 1936) he explains the term "modalities" and the reaction to Vancouver to his work:

Those semi-abstracts I call "Modalities" this new word dug up from the dictionary, and so far as I think it is the only classification which interprets the expression of this work., It means 'expression of thought in relation to nature' and was considered by Kant to relate to creative expressions which did not relate to nature (objectively), nor relate to abstract thoughts (subjectively) about nature, but rather included both expressions...Strangely enough the Vancouver people have not scoffed at these canvasses, and many appear interested. What I find so interesting is the complete lack of scoffing. The desire for new thought expressions in the arts appears to be more general than one might imagine."

Vancouver: Art And Artists 1931-1983. Vancouver: The Vancouver Art Gallery, 1983.

Although the interest was there, in public curiosity for "the new," Macdonald's support came from a small circle of friends. They included photographer John Vanderpant, Emily Carr, and eventually Lawren Harris when he arrived in Vancouver in 1940. But it was not enough. Macdonald had to make the decision to leave that is so often forced upon westcoast artists—the result of deprival of direct contact with prevailing art interests, and lack of financial support (compounded, in Macdonald's case, by the depressed economy). In 1946 he left for Calgary, eventually settling in Toronto.



J.W.G. (Jock) Macdonald Indian Burial, Nootka 1937