2018 May | Hodgins Art Auctions

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signed, titled & dated
Provenance: Galeria Fucares, Madrid ES /Almargo ES / San Francisco CA (label verso); Newzones Gallery of Contemporary Art, Calgary AB (documentation verso)

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signed

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signed, titled & dated

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signed, titled & dated

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left panel signed & dated
Provenance: This work comes from a private Calgary collection, having been acquired directly from Spickett by the parents of the consignor, who were friends of the artist. It has come by descent to the current owner.

Note: Ron Spickett initially trained with Gus Kenderdine, in his native Regina, before coming to Calgary to study at the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art (now SAIT/ACAD), attending from 1946-49. Following his studies, he worked long hours at a number of commercial jobs, including as a window display artist for the Hudson Bay Co., painting and exhibiting when he could. Then, in 1955, Spickett won a full scholarship to attend the Instituto Allende, in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

Mexico was at the forefront of the Post WWII wave of interest in mural painting, led by internationally acclaimed artists such as Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Diego Rivera. Spickett had himself produced a mural for the Provincial Institute in 1949, while studying under Buck Kerr, and soon after that developed a series on the Human Condition, also a theme of focus with the Mexican muralists. While in Mexico (1955-56), Spickett was able to immerse himself in his work and experiment with his techniques. He toured Mexico City and Guadelajara to see murals, “took side trips and saw religious parades…also art showing suffering” (p. 58*).

Spickett’s approach to figures, colour and medium were affected by his time in Mexico. For a time, Spickett became passionate about bringing muralism to Canada, and hoped to encourage Canadian clients (public and corporate) to commission murals. He produced a number of mural sketches, one of which was selected by the National Gallery for a touring exhibition. While this dream proved elusive, Spickett did go on to produce a number of murals, most lost, including a major 13-metre wide mural in the lobby of the Bowlen Building in Calgary.

The Nickle Arts Museum (Calgary) held a major retrospective of Spickett’s work “The Spirit Matters” in 2009.

*Reference: “Spirit Matters – Ron (Gyo-Zo) Spickett, Artist, Poet, Lay-Priest” (Simmons; University of Calgary Press, 2009). See page 64 for a similar work from this period.

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signed, dated & editioned; inscribed with Julienne Atelier foundry mark.

Note: In the early 1980s Joe Fafard began to create portraits of artists, in particular, the great masters and innovators of the Western art world. At this time, he came across an edited collection of letters that Vincent van Gogh had written to his brother and confidant. “Dear Theo” had a profound impact on Fafard, motivating him to search out the complete edition of the letters, as well as biographies and other written material on the artist. He then travelled to Amsterdam to view a retrospective at the Van Gogh Museum.

Fafard closely studied the many self-portraits that van Gogh produced in his lifetime, even painstakingly modelling them. Over a period of five years, Fafard was inspired to create over fifty sculptural works of van Gogh, both in clay and bronze. By virtue of a deep connection to his subject, and a dedication to studying both the man and his oeuvre, Fafard was able to create works that capture at once the essence of van Gogh’s outer self, inner self and artistic self . On page 128 of “Joe Fafard” (Heath; Douglas & McIntyre, 2007) author and curator Terrence Heath provides the following analysis of Fafard’s portraits of the great artists:

Joe explores not only their likenesses and the life experiences that have moulded their features, posture and stance, but also the way they painted. His van Gogh portraits are the best example of this desire to represent the artist in the artist’s own manner of expressing himself…They not only show the depicted self but also the many varied styles and experiments that van Gogh had investigated during his short life.

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signed & dated

Maxwell Bates is Canada’s expressionist painter. Often accused by critics of being depressing, Bates responds in a 1972 interview with Terry Guernsey: “I don’t think it (my art) is as depressing as some critics say…I don’t feel that I’m criticizing society at all. If I do, it just happens, quite by accident, as a by-product – it’s not an intentional thing.” (p.20, “Maxwell Bates in Retrospect, 1921-1971”; Vancouver Art Gallery, 1973).

On the effect of his experiences during WWII on his art, Bates comments:

I don’t think it (the experience of being a POW had any effect on my art except to intensify it when I got out, because I had been thinking so much about it all the time. Some of my ideas may have clarified a little bit. I knew I wanted to do things simply and intensely and as directly as possible, and I’ve never changed from that idea. (ibid., p. 13)

On page 100 of “Alberta Society of Artists: The First Seventy Years” (Zimon: Alberta Society of Artists, 2000) Kathy Zimon writes:

Bates had spent 1949 studying with the German expressionist Max Beckmann in New York, and his figurative work is often reminiscent of the rather stark and unsentimental view of mankind characteristic of that movement. The brilliant, contrasting colours, applied in almost primitive fashion, without depth, enhance the harshness of the features and the awkward proportions of the figure, whose aggressive deformity defies the viewer’s compassion. But ultimately, as Bates put it, the subject is relatively incidental: “I am more taken up by painting than by the subject I paint.”

Additional reference: “Maxwell Bates: Canada’s Premier Expressionist of the 20th Century” (Townsend: Snyder Hedlin Fine Arts, 2005)

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signed & titled

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signed; titled & dated on the artist’s label verso (AC-925)

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signed, titled & dated