2025 December | Hodgins Art Auctions

Notes:

signed and dated on the underside

Notes:

signed, titled, dated and editioned

Note: This work is illustrated on page 102 of “Joe Fafard: The Bronze Years” (Mayo Graham; The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; 1996).

Notes:

signed, titled, dated and editioned in pencil

Note: This work is illustrated on page 26 of “Margaret Shelton Block Prints 1936-1984” (Patricia Ainslie; Glenbow-Alberta Institute; 1984).

Notes:

signed, titled, dated and editioned in pencil

Provenance: The Collectors’ Gallery of Art, Calgary AB (label verso)

Notes:

signed lower left; signed, titled and dated verso

Notes:

signed lower right; signed and titled verso

Notes:

signed lower right; signed and titled verso; dated on the gallery label verso

Provenance: Canada House Gallery, Banff AB

Notes:

signed and dated lower right

Provenance: Former collection of James Allan (Jim) Coutts C.M. (1938-2013), Nanton, AB. Jim Coutts was a friend of Janet Mitchell’s and acquired this painting directly from the artist. The work was subsequently purchased by a friend (private collection, Toronto ON).

Notes:

signed, titled, dated and editioned in pencil

Note: This work is illustrated on page 16 of “David Blackwood: Master Printmaker” (William Gough; Firefly Books; 2001); and as plate 61 in “Black Ice: David Blackwood, Prints of Newfoundland (Katharine Lochlan, editor; Douglas & McIntyre/Art Gallery of Ontario; 2011).

David Blackwood’s experiences growing up on the northeast coast of Newfoundland laid the foundations for an important artistic practice that spanned over 50 years. Dubbed the “gothic master” of his home province, the artist’s dramatic visions of life by the sea are an amalgamation of real historical events, legends, dreams, and childhood memories. Born in Wesleyville to a seafaring family, Blackwood’s father and grandfather were ship captains, and so as a child, he spent many summers aboard his father’s schooner, the Flora S. Nickerson.
Blackwood’s scenes of the cold Atlantic unfold dramatically, the treacherous bid to survive on the frigid waters. “It is a landscape both mysterious and starkly simple,” he noted; “… a region of tremendous, even surreal, contrasts of atmosphere, light, and character. Its strange, bleak beauty carries an undercurrent of danger, an undefined threat which seems to lurk just below the surface.”

In The Loss of the Flora S. Nickerson, David Blackwood gives us a glimpse under the waves, where an enormous mother whale, positioned protectively over her calf, glides perilously close to the rowboat above. The intensity of the moment is palpable, and we see a parallel moment of parental protection in the rowboat above, where a child is huddled protectively in the arms of one of the passengers.

“One gets a sense that powers as old as Creation move through this watery dreamscape,” Blackwood observed; “and that the whales who spectacularly breach and sound into its black depths are somehow an embodiment of this sublime power.”

Reference: “The Light Keeper”, Darcy Rhyno, Saltscapes Magazine, November/December 2008, Vol. 9(6), pp. 25-29.

Notes:

signed lower right

Provenance: purchased directly from the artist by the aunt (Sally Porter) of the current consignor; private collection, Massachusetts, USA

Note: This lot is accompanied by a copy of a letter dated July 21, 1966 describing the purchase of four works by Maud Lewis, reading in part:

“That morning I went down to Maud Lewis’s. She didn’t have one picture on hand. The tourist from all over Canada and the United States come to buy the pictures. I ordered 4 and I told her to hide them after they were done. She said she’ll have a couple done by next Tuesday so we’re going down next Tuesday at 6:30 to pick them up. I thought I’d better order 4 at 7 dollars each, as later on the prices may go up with such a great demand for them. As I get them I’ll mail them to you, as they are about 12 in by 14 in. Later on I’d like to pick one up now and then for myself, as I’d like to get a few before she dies. She’s now about 82 years old. She’s really the Grandma Moses of Canada. I’ll try to take a picture of the shack her + her husband live in. It’s just unbelievable. She’s a tiny wizzled up old lady. Really remarkable. Some say her little paintings will be worth plenty. She paints the same as Grandma Moses. Crude paintings but very colourful. I’ll also take a picture of her + her husband next Tuesday so that we’ll have one of them + their surroundings.”

The scene is one from a series of similar images painted by Maud Lewis late in her life at this locale, along Digby Neck, just west of the Lewis House in Marshalltown, N.S.