signed, titled & dated
In the late 1950s, Marion Nicoll’s artistic sensibility began to shift, away from the decorative and naturalistic works she had been taught and encouraged to produce, toward the metaphor and abstraction she felt herself drawn toward. Nicoll spent 1958-1959 studying in New York, then continuing to paint in Europe before returning to Canada.
Nicoll, in her mature work, sought out the essence and form of a subject – imagery reduced to its basic elements and structure. This work exhibits a simple elegance, with interlocking shapes and abstract figures. The artist explains her process: “I start with something – the model – the street we live in…and struggle with the thing, drawing it, trying to find the skeleton that is there.” Of her vision, Nicoll states “Painting for me is all on the picture plane, the actual surface of the canvas, with the power held in the horizontal and vertical movements of the expanding colour shapes. There can be, for me, no overlapping, transparencies, or fuzzy edges…”
-excerpts from pp. 145-6 “A History of Art in Alberta 1905-1970” (Townshend 2005).
