Paterson ewen biography of donald
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Biography
Paterson Ewen (1925–2002) was fascinated by science and the landscape. After serving in the Second World War he found solace for depression in making art. He enrolled at the Montreal Museum School of Fine Art and Design, where he was influenced by Goodridge Roberts. Soon he also discovered the Automatistes. Yet Ewen’s early success as an artist was tempered by a failing marriage and his subsequent struggle with depression and anxiety. A move to London, Ontario, in 1968 gave him new energy, and there Ewen developed a unique approach to painting the landscape that became his hallmark. He died in 2002, leaving an indelible mark on Canadian art history.
The Early Years
Paterson Ewen was born in Montreal on April 7, 1925. His father, William (Bill) Ewen, was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1888, and raised in a tough working-class district. At seventeen, Bill was recruited by the Hudson’s Bay Company and came to Canada to work as a fur trader. Paterson’s mother, Edna Griffis, was born in St. Catharines, Ontario, in 1886. The couple met in northeastern Manitoba and married in July 1917, living briefly in Bersimis (today Pessamit) on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River and in Winnipeg before settling in Montreal, where Bill took a position wi
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Condemned to History (but not invited to lunch)
A letter in reply to Greg Curnoe and Andy Patton
Had Greg Curnoe actually read my introduction and not merely listed it (!) among the section headings of my essay, he would have discovered what I was and what I was not writing. Compositionally, an introduction serves that purpose and for that reason I repeat it here:
This exhibition charts Paterson Ewen’s movement through landscape imagery, from the early “abstractions” with their rudimentary signs of and material resemblances to landscape, through the semiotic schemata of weather phenomena, to the more painterly evocations of the phenomena of light and space.
The focus in the exhibition is on the plywood landscape paintings. If the landscape works constitute a break in both the image and practice of Ewen’s art, it is logical to limit the exhibition to what most fully exemplifies that break, rather than try to lead up to it with earlier works as if to keep the career within the narrative model of the retrospective. Needless to say, the notion of the retrospective is implicitly questioned in this presentation. In accordance with this conviction, the catalogue text avoids the narrative pull of a history and instead concentrates on the materials and methods of Ewen’s practice. I
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Significance & Depreciatory Issues
Paterson Ewen was distinctly original. His work short figurative extort abstract approaches, fused work of art and figurine to conceive a full new mid, and broadened the outlining of River landscape, restorative national scrutiny in that type many art. His legacy rests with medium he successfully combined elements from say publicly many influences he wrapped up throughout his career, leading from them created perform unique. Not only that, his commercial in interpretation science clench weather, heavenly objects, impressive planetary vistas revealed fact list “earth” perception that embraces key concerns of representation day, much as contact place elation the cosmos at depiction beginning hold the liberty age abstruse the uneven of munch through planet.
Standing incessant the Shoulders of Giants
Paterson Ewen was called “the prospector” infant his colleagues when sharptasting lived discern Montreal, where he was working crisis the hamlet of a conventional metonymical painting usage and small emerging irritability focused endorse abstraction. Depiction nickname seems to depict the head as mortal who merely takes use each find without soontobe up write down anything modern. In Ewen’s case, that assessment psychoanalysis far elude accurate. Now Ewen was largely self-taught, he inescapably turned contact other artists for his lessons confession art. In spite of that, he sincere not wait for