monogrammed lower right; signed, titled & dated on the stretcher verso
Provenance: Formerly from the corporate collection of Home Oil Ltd. / Devon Energy (Calgary AB)
Kerr was drawn to art as a boy, growing up in Lumsden, Saskatchewan. His first teacher was his mother, a watercolour artist, who encouraged him to pursue an artistic career. At age 14, the young artist entered a number of his works in the Regina Exhibition of 1919, earning 13 first prize awards, and gaining the confidence to go further. Kerr received his formal training in Toronto, at the Ontario College of Art (1923-1927), where his instructors included Arthur Lismer, J. E. H. MacDonald, Frederick Varley, and William Beatty. While the Group of Seven approach to painting was not expressly taught at OCA, Kerr was exposed to the ideals and philosophy of the Group. While in Toronto, he attended exhibitions and visited several studios, including those of A. Y. Jackson and Lawren Harris. Kerr was inspired to apply this non-traditional, emotive, and uniquely Canadian approach to landscape painting in Western Canada.
During his life, Kerr not only became an accomplished and respected artist, but an influential instructor and mentor for new generations of artists. In 1946, he accepted a teaching position at the Vancouver School of Art, and the following year moved to Calgary to head the Art Department at the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art (now Alberta University of the Arts). Under his 20-year tenure, Illingworth Kerr was largely responsible for the development of art education in Calgary. This responsibility and commitment constrained Kerr, and he was not able to paint full time until his retirement in 1967. At this stage, Kerr was able to approach his art with the freedom and perspective of a mature artist. He experimented with abstraction, with colour and brushwork, and finally began to feel personal satisfaction with his work, having gained the understanding that “the essence of a work of art is the product of a personality”. In his reflections, Kerr writes: “Some say, ‘Your subject does not matter; it’s what you do to it.’ I say what matters is what your subject does to you”. Nowhere is this clearer, that in Kerr’s nocturnes. During these later years, Kerr truly mastered the nuanced palette of the nocturne, blending hues to alternately elicit light and darken shadows. In this iconic scene of Elbow Falls, the starlight illuminates the rushing water and plays dramatically off the dark riverbanks. Kerr has embraced the black ground upon which he richly layers colour. Kerr wrote: “Black offered its void of space from which to move forward – or into which to retreat when external appearance of form threatened to mask the personality beneath”. Kerr’s late nocturnes are sublime renderings that succeed in capturing mood, atmosphere and the essence of a moment in a way unmatched by earlier works.
Reference: “Illingworth Kerr: Fifty Years a Painter”; Alberta College of Art; 1973.
Note: the corresponding sketch for this major canvas is offered in this sale as lot 161.
