Jock Macdonald
Nationality: Scottish-born Canadian
Born: 1897-05-31, Thurso, Scotland
Died: 1960-12-03

A graduate of the Edinburgh College of Art, Macdonald emigrated to Canada in 1927 to become head of design and instructor in commercial advertising at the newly-established Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts (now the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design). Inspired by the natural environment, Macdonald and his colleague Frederick Varley, head of drawing, painting, and composition, spent much of their free time on weekends and summer vacations on sketching and camping trips in the Garibaldi Mountains. Macdonald's rendering of the familiar Table Mountain, Black Tusk, Castel Towers, and Howe Sound are early representative pieces included in the exhibition along with other well-known canvasses such as Lytton Church, B.C., in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada and Indian Burial, Nootka, in the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery.

When the Depression forced severe salary cuts in the art school budget, Macdonald and Varley decided to found the B.C. College of Art, in premises on Georgia Street later occupied by Maynards Auctioneers. It quickly established a reputation as a centre of new and stimulating ideas in a variety of art forms including music, dance and photography as well as the visual arts. The school operated for two years before declaring bankruptcy, but its influence on the local cultural community of the period is now legendary.

Macdonald himself was infected by the exciting ideas fostered at the College and he began experiments in abstraction. He soon found landscape painting in the tradition of his Group of Seven contemporaries too confining whereas abstraction opened up new vistas of expressive freedom.

During his twenty years in B.C. Macdonald was active as artist, teacher, exhibitor, and arts organizer. He was a member of the B.C. Society of Artists, with whom he exhibited regularly, a charter member of the Federation of Canadian Artists and a member of the Vancouver Art Gallery Council for eleven years, serving on its judging, exhibitions and hanging committees, and implementing its popular Saturday morning classes.

The Vancouver Art Gallery accorded Macdonald his first one man show in May 1941 and five years later mounted a solo exhibition, of his "automatic" watercolours.

Macdonald moved to Toronto in 1947 and became instructor of painting at the Ontario College of Art. In 1953 he was instrumental in the founding of Painters Eleven, a group dedicated to the promotion of abstract art.