signed lower left; titled on the artist’s label verso
Provenance: Kensington Fine Art Gallery, Calgary AB
There are few artists who have travelled and depicted the Canadian landscape as broadly as Alan Collier. Characterized by clean lines and bold use of colour, his paintings are commanding in their simplicity: “I know I try to get angular things, that angular subjects attract me,” Collier noted in 1971, “I try to simplify things … to get a simple pattern.”
In 1956, Collier, on summer leave from his job as an instructor at the Ontario College of Art, took a three-month sketching trip with his family across Western Canada. It proved so successful that the family continued this tradition, travelling across the entirety of Canada every summer for the rest of his career. The prairies provided a perfect opportunity for Collier to carve out the simple, angular patterns that he sought out. Collier has captured the expansive and rhythmic fields here with the elegant geometry for which he is so well known. The fields undulate towards the horizon, drawing our eyes across the prairie landscape against a stormy prairie sky.
