Page 31 - Studio International - December 1968

retinal bludgeoning of conventional 'minimal op' idioms. There are dication of his Japanese inheritance, is an instinctive response to
no parallels for it in Canadian painting, and few anywhere. rhythms and forms that link the painter's own activity with what used
to be called 'the world of nature'. His geometry, even at its most for-
Roy Kiyooka mal, is of a kind that has repeatedly been characterized as 'fluid' or
In spite of an intensiveness of art-school activity which is considerably `organic'; a geometry not of the flat circle but of the glowing ellipse.
more marked in Canada than it is in the United States, even the most At its most austere, it is marked by serenity, poise and a kind of
influential of Canadian painter-teachers do not group disciples round civilized grace. Like Godwin and McKay of the Regina group, Kiy-
them. There are not maitres as there are not écoles, largely because— ooka studied at Calgary, and along with most of his contemporaries
with everything in Canadian art happening so much at once —there was involved in the gestural painting of the 1950s, in which organic
is not the settled sequence and distinction between generations that imagery and densely worked surfaces were primarily an expression
allows of that kind of continuity. Instead there is a sharp gap between of the creative process evolving out of a flowing and muscular brush-
those whose crucial development 'belongs' to the period since the stroke. At Emma Lake, a more objective structure took control. By
later 1950s and those who somehow find themselves in the limbo of 1963 the gestural image was becoming enclosed within a hard-edge
pre-history before that great awakening. Kiyooka, born in 1926 and geometry, and by 1964 it had given way to large areas of minimal
a native of Saskatchewan, was a leading member of the Regina form and within discreetly ordered boundaries. He had now moved
Group, and one of those who were not only radically influenced in to Vancouver, and while there visited Japan on a Canada Council
their own painting by the summer sessions of the Emma Lake work- grant, and in some exceptionally beautiful canvases of 1965 the
shop, but who were instrumental in turning that experience from geometry relaxed again, the linear borders becoming tidal edges to
one of regional into one of national significance. As a teacher alone, the calm central expanse of colour. Since his move to Montreal in
his example has been widely influential (though most concentrated that year, Kiyooka's idiom has grown more personal and even more
in Vancouver, where he took a teaching post from Regina) in coolly lyrical with the adoption of the oval as a presiding motif and a
bringing, not a style or a doctrine, but a sense of direction and poten- change to subdued relationships of tone within an over-all colour. It
tial to a newly alert generation of younger painters. His own develop- is tempting to try and detect in the career of a painter who has
ment, during and since Emma Lake, is in line with his teaching. It worked in the geographical and cultural extremes of Canada—the
shows, that is to say, the direct experience of American 'big attack' isolation of the central provinces, the explosion of a new West Coast
painting enlarging a Canadian sensibility without making it any the awareness, the metropolitan centres of influence in the East—some
more American. Running through all Kiyooka's work, and an in- synthesis of Canadian attitudes. But the speculation would be mis-
placed. Kiyooka may have been shaped by, as he has himself to
Roy K. Kiyooka Barometer No. 2 1964, polymer (aquatex) on canvas,
some extent helped to shape, a particular Canadian situation. But he
95¾ x 68 in. Coll : Art Gallery of Ontario
is conspicuously not, because of that, a 'Canadian' artist in any
narrow sense. The breadth of his experience is possibly reflected in the
mature certainty of his work, but the result is not bounded by national
frontiers.

Kenneth Lochhead
Canada's landscape-tradition is now past history, something over-
taken by events and consciously rejected. But it would be naive, or
else a gross over-simplification of the complex problem of how artists
relate their art to the experience of their environment, to argue that,
because Canadian art has recently and dramatically hauled itself out
of provincial and isolationist attitudes, the physical nature of the
country is no longer a relevant consideration. I suggested in my
previous articles that urban culture in Canada is possibly not yet
deeply ingrained enough in the Canadian consciousness to be wholly
assimilated even in those areas of Canadian art that most seem to be
the product of it. Canada is not, to reiterate the obvious, the United
States. And as I imply below in relation to Greg Curnoe, regionalism
is one of the facts of Canadian art, a significant if not a dominant one,
which characterize its difference from American art.
Lochhead, like Kiyooka, is one of the leading figures of the genera-
tion now in its forties. Central Canada is the background of both,
and they shared the experience of the Emma Lake workshop and the
years of the Regina Group. Kiyooka has moved away, but Lochhead
has remained in the central provinces : he is now at Winnipeg. And
it is impossible wholly to dissociate his art or its development from
the physical facts of an environment which is almost obsessive in its
singularity. The prairie is of a flatness and endlessness that make even
its cities look like arbitrary interruptions of the dominant horizontal,
and the dryness of the air adds exceptional clarity to what are already
visually exceptional conditions. When Lochhead met painters like
Newman and Noland at Emma Lake, it was therefore something
more than aesthetic persuasion which converted him to `big attack'
colour-painting, and if his work today looks in some respects closer
to the Americans in its command of scale and the totality of the
colour-field than is usual in Canadian painting, one might say para-