&nRarely do you get the opportunity to get inside of an artist’s head – to know what he or she was thinking from conception to completion of a masterpiece. bsp;
Catherine Elliot Shaw, curator of the McIntosh Gallery, examines preparatory sketches, drawings and unfinished panels by St. Thomas artist Clark McDougall for insight into his painting process. The gallery is looking for McDougall’s paintings for an upcoming exhibition in March.
But thanks to a unique donation to the McIntosh Gallery at The University of Western Ontario, art lovers will get a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the mind of renowned St. Thomas artist Clark McDougall.
McDougall, a painter known nationally for his distinctive style using black enamel and vibrant colours, has influenced Canadian artists for several decades. He died of a brain tumor in 1980. To celebrate his work, the McIntosh Gallery is planning an exhibit in March 2011.
“He was a master colourist. He understood how to mix colours,” says McIntosh Gallery curator Catherine Elliot Shaw.
Although the gallery has 19 pieces of McDougall’s work in its collection, they are on a treasure hunt for his missing works suspected to be in private collections. In finding these lost paintings, Elliot Shaw hopes to piece together the development process of McDougall’s most famous, and some not-so-famous, works.
McDougall was known as a meticulous artist – keeping notations on his thoughts, painting technique and even the weather and mood he wanted to capture from his regular jaunts through the landscape of Elgin and Perth counties.
A few years ago, McDougall’s family gifted Western a significant collection of his sketches, drawings, slides, unfinished panels and personal journals. The donation also included what Elliot Shaw believes was McDougall’s last work.
The family wanted to give the collection to a place where it could be preserved and studied making the McIntosh Gallery, which is not only a public gallery, but also has a research and academic mission, a perfect fit. “This marries the research of visual art with the preservation and presentation of visual art,” says Elliot Shaw.
Flipping through the carefully crafted journal entries, she is able to get a sense of McDougall’s thought processes about his painting, the landscapes he was trying to capture, and his growing anxiety during the 1960s and 1970s about the changing way of life on the farm. It is an incredible primary resource for future research.
“We know how passionate he was to record what he saw as a passing away of an old life,” she says. “The things he loved the most are dilapidated buildings. He wanted to capture that before it was lost forever.”
The slides he took during his walkabouts would be the starting blocks for a painting. He made detailed notes on his sketches as a reminder about the weather, wind direction and mood of the landscape he was trying to reproduce. The gallery also has evidence of his transfer method, moving from sketches and cartoons to the canvas.
He also famously captured streetscapes of London and St. Thomas.
As his style evolved, he introduced heavy black lines to define the silhouettes within the paintings. He started using black enamel for the outlines, filled in with luminescent colours, which became his artistic signature.
Elliot Shaw says the collection of material from McDougall’s studio is invaluable. The gallery’s archive now houses boxes of sketchbooks, hundreds of small sketches on individual pieces of paper, cartoons used to determine a composition, unfinished paintings on masonite and a countless number of slides.
The extensive archival collection – the gallery’s largest holding of such materials – also give clues about existing works, including those that have never been exhibited. The goal is to exhibit both his primary materials and the iconic paintings together in the March exhibition.
Among the paintings the gallery is searching for is McDougall’s “Buffalo newsstand” which has was purchased in the late 1980s and since disappeared. The McIntosh Gallery has the slides McDougall took while visiting fellow painter and friend Charles Burchfield in Buffalo, N.Y. that were cut up and collaged together, as well as the initial sketch.
“We are also looking for work that we don’t know is in private hands,” adds Elliot Shaw. “We know they exist, but we don’t know where they are.”
The gallery is looking this fall for information about McDougall’s paintings in preparation for next year’s exhibition. Anyone with information can contact Elliot Shaw at celliots@uwo.ca.
