Paterson Ewen

Paterson Ewen (April 7, 1925 – February 17, 2002) was an influential Canadian painter. Ewen was a founding member of the Non-figurative artist's association of Montréal, along with Claude Tousignant, Jean-Paul Mousseau, Guido Molinari, and Marcel Barbeau. Moving to London, Ontario in the late 1960s, Ewen became central to the emerging London Regionalism being championed by Jack Chambers and Greg Curnoe. It was in London that Ewen developed the carved-plywood style that would become his hallmark.[1]

Paterson Ewen
Paterson Ewen in his army uniform, c. 1944
Born(1925-04-07)April 7, 1925
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
DiedFebruary 17, 2002(2002-02-17) (aged 76)
London, Ontario, Canada
EducationMontreal Museum School of Fine Art and Design
Partner(s)Françoise Sullivan (1949-1965) Mary Handford (1995-)

Biography

William Paterson Ewen was born in 1925 in Montreal, Quebec. Interested in art from a young age, he began by sculpting small figures in wax, and at thirteen petitioned his mother to hang art on the previously unadorned walls of the Ewen residence.[2] Beginning in 1944, Ewen served in a reconnaissance regiment on the Western Front (World War II), but was not involved in active combat. Upon his return to Canada, he enrolled in McGill University. He studied geology, but after his first year he began to struggle with depression, and sought relief in copying magazine covers and sketching the landscape around Canadian Officers' Training Corps at Saint-Gabriel-de-Valcartier where he had re-enlisted for the summer. When he returned to school in the fall, Ewen signed up for a figure-drawing course taught by John Goodwin Lyman. The experience was, as Ewen recalls it, unpleasant.[3] The next year he transferred to the School of Art and Design at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, where he studied under Goodridge Roberts, Arthur Lismer, Marian Dale Scott, William Armstrong, Moses Reinblatt, and Jacques de Tonnancour. Ewen sometimes recalled this period, caught up in Goodridge's orbit and the "sympathetic atmosphere," of the program, as "the happiest days of [his] life.[4][5]

In 1949, Ewen married the influential painter, sculptor and choreographer Françoise Sullivan,[6] with whom he had four sons. Sullivan was an important member of Les Automatistes, and Ewen would often attend Automatiste events and "sit without taking part in the conversation all that much, but of course it was very enriching [for him]."[5] Ewen's graduation that same year marked the end of his veteran's allowance, and so he went to work, first making hats, then selling rugs at Ogilvy's.[4] He eventually found a position with Sullivan's father as an assistant secretary to the chief administrator at the municipal rent control board, where he remained until taking an employment supervisor position at Bathurst Containers in 1956.

When Sullivan and Ewen separated in 1966, and Ewen once again grappled with major depression. In 1968 he moved to Kitchener, Ontario in order to be closer to his sister Marjorie, and immediately checked himself into the Westminster Veteran's Hospital for intensive treatment, including electroconvulsive therapy. Ewen felt that the treatment was helpful, and that it restored him to "a state of good physical and mental health,"[7] though he continued to struggle with his mental health and his relationship to alcohol. He went on to teach at H. B. Beal Secondary School until he was awarded a Canada Council grant in 1971. The grant allowed him to take a studio in Toronto, and this is where he developed his signature style, gouging landscapes out of massive plywood sheets with an electric router. When Ewen returned to Toronto, his Beal Secondary job had gone to someone else, but there was an opening at the University of Western Ontario. Ewen would spend 14 years at UWO as a painting instructor. This is where he met architecture student Mary Handford, who became his wife in 1995.[2]

Career

Ewen's career began with explorations of the landscape.The influence of James Wilson Morrice, and his professor Goodridge Roberts can be seen in Ewen's early works, completed while he was still attending the School of Art and Design.[8] During this period Ewen was, in his own words, "a pretty straightforward figurative painter influenced by the Post-Impressionists."[9][10] This began to change around 1949, when Françoise Sullivan's influence and the Automatiste milieu pushed Ewen towards abstraction. This tension between surface and figurative form can be seen in paintings like Interior, Fort Street, Montréal [#1] (1951). Ewen showed very little until 1955, when he began exhibiting abstract works. This new way of painting balanced the psychic automatism of les Automatistes with the rising star of hard-edged geometric Plasticiens like Molinari and Tousignant, both of whom Ewen shared a studio with in the mid-1960s. During this period, Ewen was also influenced by Camilla Gray's work on Russian Constructivism, the monochromes of Paul-Émile Borduas, and the work of Northwest Coast artists[11] on display at the Royal Ontario Museum.

In 1971 Ewen moved to London, and there found inspiration in the growing London Regionalism movement, which emphasized specificity of place and time. Once again, Ewen's methods changed dramatically, rejecting abstraction in favour of dynamic, figurative "phenomscapes."[12] This way of looking at landscape allowed Ewen to revisit his boyhood interests in geology and space.[13] The new pieces were physically large, often using several standard 4' x 8' sheets of plywood side by side. Ewen used a router to tear into the surface, sometimes re-attaching objects to the plane with hardware. These shallow topographies were then painted with huge, rolling forces, gestures towards what Roald Nasgaard called "a strategy to make landscape painting vital again."[14] Ewen described this way of working as cathartic:

I enjoyed the physicality of it, particularly after the meticulousness of the hard-edge painting. It was like a kind of therapy. I may not have felt the tension and anger pouring out of me when I did it, but it felt awfully good afterwards.[15]

These were the works that solidified Ewen's place in the annals of Canadian art. He worked on many series in this mode, returning again, and again to the ever-changing natural world. No subject is more integral to an understanding Ewen's work, and perhaps Ewen himself, than the moon, whose phases he painted endlessly. As John G. Hatch writes: "by tying the moon’s many faces to constant change in the natural world, Ewen made sense of his own moods and affirmed his connection to the universe."[16]

Selected exhibitions
  • 2000: Palazzo Grassi, Venice: Cosmos: From Goya to De Chirico, From Friedrich to Kiefer
  • 1996: Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto: Ewen: Earthly Weathers, Heavenly Skies (major retrospective)
  • 1982: Venice Biennale

Selected collections
  • National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
  • Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
  • Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal
  • Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
  • Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto
  • MIT List Visual Artistiiscis centres of the west

Selected publications
  • Hatch, John G. Paterson Ewen: Life & Work. Toronto: Art Canada Institute, 2018. ISBN 978-1-4871-0158-9
  • Paterson Ewen: Biennale di Venezia [exhibition catalogue]. 1982.
  • Teitelbaum, Matthew. Paterson Ewen: The Montreal Years. Saskatoon: Mendel Art Gallery, 1988.
  • Teitelbaum, Matthew (ed.). Paterson Ewen. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1996.

Honours
  • Prix des Laurentides, 1957[17]
  • numerous Canada Council awards and fellowships[17]
  • Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, 1975[17][18]
  • Banff Centre School of Fine Arts National Award, 1987[17]
  • Toronto Arts Award for Visual Arts, 1988;[19][17]
  • Professor Emeritus, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, 1988[17]
  • DLitt, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, 1989[17]
  • honorary DLaws, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, 1989[17]
  • Jean A Chalmers National Visual Arts Award, Ontario Arts Council 1995[17][20]

Notes
  1. Hatch, John G. (2018). Paterson Ewen: Life & Work. Toronto: Art Canada Institute. ISBN 978-1-4871-0158-9. Archived from the original on 2019-03-28. Retrieved 2019-03-17.
  2. "Paterson Ewen". Art Canada Institute - Institut de l’art canadien. Archived from the original on 2019-03-28. Retrieved 2019-03-28.
  3. "Paterson Ewen". Art Canada Institute - Institut de l’art canadien. Archived from the original on 2019-03-28. Retrieved 2019-03-28.
  4. "Paterson Ewen". Art Canada Institute - Institut de l’art canadien. Archived from the original on 2019-03-28. Retrieved 2019-03-28.
  5. Ewen, “Paterson Ewen, March, 1976,” 341, and Matthew Teitelbaum, Paterson Ewen: The Montreal Years (Saskatoon: Mendel Art Gallery, 1987), 36.
  6. "Françoise Sullivan: Life & Work". Art Canada Institute - Institut de l’art canadien. Archived from the original on 2019-03-27. Retrieved 2019-03-29.
  7. Paterson Ewen interview by Robert McKaskell, London, Ontario, spring 1976, cited in Teitelbaum,Paterson Ewen, 115.
  8. "Paterson Ewen, Interior, Fort Street, Montreal [#1], 1951". Art Canada Institute - Institut de l’art canadien. Archived from the original on 2019-03-28. Retrieved 2019-03-29.
  9. Paterson Ewen interview by Greg Curnoe, March 18, 1969, cited in Teitelbaum, Paterson Ewen, 99.
  10. "Paterson Ewen, Interior, Fort Street, Montreal [#1], 1951". Art Canada Institute - Institut de l’art canadien. Archived from the original on 2019-03-28. Retrieved 2019-03-29.
  11. This refers broadly to works by Tlingit, Haida, Heiltsuk, Nuxalk, Tsimshian, Kwakwaka'wakw, Nuu-chah-nulth artists, but the ROM's collection has a specific history with Kwakwaka'wakw arts spoliated from Alert Bay in 1921 under the Canadian government's Potlatch ban.
  12. "Paterson Ewen". Art Canada Institute - Institut de l’art canadien. Archived from the original on 2019-03-28. Retrieved 2019-03-29.
  13. Shadbolt, Doris (September 1, 1977). "Paterson Ewen: Recent Works". Journal. The National Gallery of Canada (24).
  14. Adele Archived 2019-03-29 at the Wayback Machine Freedman, “Phenomenology,” Canadian Art4, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 61.
  15. Cited in Graham, “Twenty-Four Sketches,” 26.
  16. "Paterson Ewen". Art Canada Institute - Institut de l’art canadien. Archived from the original on 2019-03-28. Retrieved 2019-03-29.
  17. "In Memoriam: Paterson Ewen". University of Western Ontario. Archived from the original on 17 September 2013. Retrieved 17 September 2013.
  18. "Members since 1880". Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. Archived from the original on May 26, 2011. Retrieved 11 September 2013.
  19. "AGO Director Curates Major Exhibition of Works by Paterson Ewen". Art Gallery of Ontario. Archived from the original on 18 May 2013. Retrieved 17 September 2013.
  20. "The Chalmers Awards for Creativity and Excellence in the Arts Laureates". Ontario Arts Council. Archived from the original on 15 April 2012. Retrieved 17 September 2013.
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