Jock Macdonald

Jock Macdonald (1897-1960), Canadian painter and teacher whose colorful works were among the first abstract paintings created in Canada. James Williamson Galloway Macdonald was born in Thurso, Scotland, and trained in commercial art at the Edinburgh College of Art. He immigrated to Canada in 1926 to teach at the Vancouver School of Art. There, under the guidance of a colleague, Canadian landscape painter Frederick Varley, Macdonald took up oil painting. Although he initially painted landscapes, by 1935 he was experimenting with abstraction and producing paintings based on nature but abstract in form.

In 1943, influenced by work of British psychologist and painter Grace Pailthorpe, Macdonald began to paint imagery derived from the subconscious mind. This practice was characteristic of an influential movement known as automatism for its emphasis on automatic, or spontaneous, creation. The watercolors he produced at this time were brilliantly colored and highly imaginative.

In 1946 Macdonald moved to Toronto to teach at the Ontario College of Art, where he influenced a generation of younger painters. A Although he was much older than his students, he was later invited to exhibit with some of them in the Painters Eleven, a group of abstract painters.

Macdonald spent the summers of 1948 and 1949 at a school run by Hans Hofmann, a German-born American painter often called the dean of abstract expressionism. Another influence was French artist Jean Dubuffet, whom he met during a stay in Europe from 1954 to 1955. After his return to Toronto, Macdonald’s artistic activity intensified as he experimented with a wide range of materials. Using Lucite 44, a type of acrylic paint, Macdonald produced a series of large-scale works, such as Fleeting Breath (1959, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada), characterized by a powerful and rich use of color and light.