Ian M. Thom. Art BC: Masterworks from British Columbia. Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas McIntyre, 2000: 30-31.

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J.W.G. Macdonald


James Williamson Galloway (Jock) Macdonald was trained as a fabric designer and came to Canada from Scotland in 1926. He was hired by Charles H. Scott to teach design at the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts. Macdonald's introduction to painting was through the example of Frederick Varley, a colleague at the art school. The two became close friends and travelled to the Garibaldi region to sketch outdoors. Initially, Macdonald showed all of his paintings to Varley to get his comments, and the early work has a stronger sense of line than form. By 1930, however, he was independent of Varley's influence and received a major boost in 1931, when the National Gallery of Canada purchased his Lytton Church, British Columbia.

Although Macdonald was a good and popular teacher, he and Varley left the art school in 1933 to found their own institution, the B.C. College of Arts, along with Harry Tauber and several of their former students. However, the Depression did not allow for two schools of art in Vancouver, and theirs closed in 1935. Macdonald, desperately poor and wanting to get closer to nature, moved, with his wife and daughter, to the west coast of Vancouver island and settled on Nootka Sound. This region, which had been visited and painted by Emily Carr, proved to be a vital source of inspiration, although the living conditions were harsh. Macdonald and his family struggled to survive, and when he injured his back, they were forced to retreat to Vancouver.

Although the Nootkan interlude was only about eighteen months long, it resulted in an important series of works. Like Carr, Macdonald was struck by the power of First Nation images that he saw, and he was also interested in spiritual issues. He was reading the philosopher Rudolf Steiner and studying the theosophical writings of Madame Blavatsky. Indian Burial, Nootka was likely begun in Nootka but was finished after his return to Vancouver. It is a powerful work that depicts the conjunction of Christian and First Nations spirituality and, of course, the scenery of the village within the landscape. The Christian elements (the priest, the crosses, the fenced burial plots) dominate the image, but the people are clearly First Nations, and a striking mask is being held by the figure at the lower right. Macdonald bathed the entire scene in a rich light and used his strong design sense to animate the image. The checkerboard patterns of the gravesite and man's jacket, and the repeated shape of the crosses, all serve to engage the eye and control our perception of the image. The iconography of Christian and First Nations beliefs within the wonder of nature is reinforced by the dramatic, distant landscape, which suggests the richness of this environment. The painting is based on a small ink drawing, also in the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, which contains many of the elements but lacks the key juxtaposition of the two worlds in the foreground.

Indian Burial, Nootka, although in many ways not the most dramatic of the First Nations subjects produced as a consequence of Macdonald's sojourn in Nootka, is the most profound. Simply and directly, it suggests something of the uneasy tension between white missionaries and the more deeply rooted indigenous cultures. What makes it a great painting is that it achieves this end almost by stealth. Viewers are seduced by the colour and design, and through these elements come to the message of the work.