CanadianArt.Waddingtons.ca
75 JOHN MEREDITH BLACK NIGHT, 1959 oil on canvas 36 ins x 48 ins; 91.4 cms x 121.9 cms Provenance: The Isaacs Gallery Ltd., Toronto Private Collection, Toronto $10,000–15,000
Note: John Meredith (Smith) was the younger brother of William Ronald (Smith) of Painters Eleven fame, but in contrast to Ronald, he was an introvert who stayed on the margins of the Toronto art community, and his work evolved at a slow and steady pace. Despite this tendency towards reclusiveness, Meredith shared an interest in Abstract Expressionism with the other young abstract painters of his generation (he began to show at the Isaacs Gallery in 1961), along with a quality that critic Barry Hale has termed “expressionist lyricism”—evidence of the artist’s hand over the surface of the painting, and total engagement with the artwork. Meredith developed his own distinctive style within the so-called “Toronto Look.”
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Meredith studied at the Ontario College of Art from 1950-1953 and had his first one-man show at the Gallery of Contemporary Art in 1958. A second show followed in March 1959 which consisted of paintings with vertical stripes that varied in colour, width and paint texture. Marie Fleming characterized these early works as alluding to human or vegetal forms and as having “a strong sense of a standing, growing force” in the catalogue of her 1974 Meredith exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Dark Night is characteristic of Meredith’s work between 1958 and 1962. The work is structured by a series of vertical lines, all of which deviate slightly from the perpendicular and extend across the entire width of the canvas. Its horizontal orientation compels us to read the work from left to right, towards the whitish stripe two-thirds of the way across which catches the eye. Otherwise, the palette is sombre—blue, black, red and ochre, mixed directly on the canvas. The vertical lines have been drawn with the brush, the field punctuated by more spontanous applications of ochre, which gives the canvas an overall texture. The work has been informed by Borduas and the Automatistes in spirit and by American Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman in its exploration of the vertical. As the title suggests, Black Night is full of mystery. What do the vertical lines represent? Trees, a line of figures in profile, or figures lurking in a forest? It demonstrates the creative approach that Meredith explained in the catalogue of his 1974 exhibition: to give material form to his conscious and unconscious reactions to the world, to colour and form and to develop new ideas through experimentation.