Estate of Jack Shadbolt

Jack Shadbolt

Lavishly illustrated with the art of Jack Shadbolt, and chronicling Shadbolt’s development, the author has created a portrait that gives an insightful look at the nature of the artistic sensibility, with liberal excerpts from the painter’s own writing.

Jack Shadbolt
The Long Echo

One of Canada’s most innovative modernists, Jack Shadbolt (1909-1998) is known for his paintings and murals that drew from both personal travels and experiences of World War II as well as the social and political context of his time. Shadbolt was born in England in 1909 and at an early age immigrated to British Columbia. In 1930 he met Emily Carr, whose work, together with the Surrealists and early Abstract Expressionist, was very influential in his artistic development. Widely exhibited across Canada and in biennales abroad, Shadbolt’s work is in the permanent collections of all major Canadian museums, and he was recognized with the Order of Canada and the Order of British Columbia.

Shadbolt’s multi-paneled works are his most significant as they demonstrate the artist’s ambitious scale and his iterative process. Much in the way that chapters within a novel deepen the detail and narrative of a written text, the ability to keep adding panels to a work allowed Shadbolt the freedom to realize the full potential of his subject matter. As his imagery progresses from one discrete panel to another, it reveals his deep interest in metamorphosis and the transformative cycles of the natural world that include both and life and destruction.

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Some Drawings
A Group Exhibition

Jack Shadbolt
The Ghost Universe

Jack Shadbolt (1909 – 1998) was an influential Vancouver modernist whose experimentations with abstract painting resonated both within Canada and internationally. The body of work presented here was made in the post-war period when Shadbolt was developing his formal vocabulary as a painter. Shadbolt was one of several artists who returned to Canada after the war with a profound sense of uncertainty about the future, and whose practice looked to new imagery to express a sense of social disruption during the post-war years.

In relationship to The Ghost Universe are a selection of works by B.C. Binning, Gordon Smith, Molly Lamb Bobak, Bruno Bobak and Marion Nicoll. While stylistically diverse, these artists shared an awareness of the anxieties and uncertainties during the post-war era as well as an eagerness to explore abstraction as a means of expression.

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Jack Shadbolt, Untitled, 1958

Jack Shadbolt, Nocturne, 1979

Jack Shadbolt, Summer Suite, 1979

Jack Shadbolt, Cornish Fishing Cove, 1947

Jack Shadbolt, Morning Deck #2, 1980

Jack Shadbolt, Morning Deck #2, 1980_Panel 1