Paterson Ewen: The Turn from Non-Figurative to Figurative Painting
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Author/collaborator |
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Title |
Paterson Ewen: The Turn from Non-Figurative to Figurative Painting
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Abstract |
William Paterson Ewen (1925-2002) was born in Montreal and attended McGill University from 1946-47 where he studied geology and fine arts with John Goodwin Lyman. From 1948-1950 he took classes at the School of Art and Design at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, studying under Goodridge Roberts, Arthur Lismer, William Armstrong, and Jacques de Tonnancour. His earliest works of the late 1940s reveal a range of interests and, particularly, the influence of Goodridge Roberts. By the mid 1950s, he had begun a 16-year exploration of abstraction, at first with gestural and then, by 1964, with geometric forms loosely related to hard-edge painting. While in Montreal, he was tangentially connected to the artists of the Automatiste movement and became a member of the Non-Figurative Artists' Association of Montreal, founded in 1956. He moved to London, Ontario, in 1968, and in 1970 turned from "abstract" or non-figurative painting to figurative painting. The author points out that after over twenty years of modernist non-figurative painting, Ewen acknowledged and found valuable the presence of subject-matter which, in Montreal during the 1950s and 1960s, had been condemned as traditional, illusory, sentimental and regressive. The author argues that Ewen's "turn" from abstract or non-figurative painting to figurative painting cannot be seen as a shocking avant-garde revolution of form nor as a return to his early figurative work of 1949–54. In his figurative and non-figurative work before 1970, she points out, Ewen believed that freedom in painting required the domination of the object over subject-matter. In his "turn," Ewen implicitly criticized this belief integral to the concept of style and the avant-garde mentality.
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Publication |
Journal of Canadian Art History/Annales d'histoire de l'art
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Volume |
Vol. 13
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Issue |
no. 1
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Pages |
25-52
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Date |
1990
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Language |
en
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URL | |
Citation |
Fraser, Heather C. “Paterson Ewen: The Turn from Non-Figurative to Figurative Painting.” Journal of Canadian Art History/Annales d’histoire de l’art Vol. 13, no. 1 (1990): 25–52. http://jcah-ahac.concordia.ca/fr/archive/1990_13-1.
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