I paint to defy death.
— Harold Town
During the 1950s, Harold Town’s work was characterized by the aesthetic concerns of Canadian abstract expressionism, a movement that Town made significant contributions to as a member of Painters Eleven. In the early 1960s, however, his work moved away from the strict formalism of Clement Greenberg, whose doctrine advocated the autonomy of the creative work and denied any reference to the outside world. Thus, Town’s polychromatic abstract paintings of this new period were marked by avant-garde experimentations inspired by a great diversity of sources. According to art historian Iris Nowell, Town produced a major body of work at this time, beginning with Banner #1 (1960, 200.6 cm by 172.7 cm), Down and Up (1961, this painting), and Festival (1965, 207 cm by 188 cm, Canada Council Art Bank), the painting used to illustrate the cover of the 2014 monograph devoted to his work.
With Down and Up, one finds an astonishing composition replete with a richness of textures and exuberant colours. Roughly divided into quadrants, like many paintings from this batch, the pictorial space features several levels, like so many conflicting road connections, access ramps, detours, and signs, urban imagery one of Town’s favourite themes. Here, he rejects all formal rigidity with an innovative gestural touch and spontaneous eruption of irregular forms. At the heart of the painting, the brushwork is particularly striking—impastos of pistachio green, lapis lazuli, lilac, pink, and orange swirl wildly to end up in a kind of pictorial causeway. Sometimes applied directly from the tube, the thick paint of bright, contrasting colours serves here to create a scintillating fresco of intermingled forms and symbols: squares, crosses, dots, and thick lines and arrows. According to professor emerita Gerta Moray, Town “highlighted the artificial nature of sign systems and art styles, and the random ways in which signs collide and coexist in the contemporary environment.” Harold Town has produced an electrifying addition to his acclaimed repertoire.
(Annie Lafleur / Trad.: Ron Ross)
