monogrammed lower left; signed and titled on the stretcher verso

 

Note: A full-page colour illustration of this painting is included in Illingworth Kerr: Fifty Years a Painter, Edmonton Art Gallery, 1963 (No. 84). Kerr additionally references this painting in Paint and Circumstance: Illingworth Kerr, Private publication, Calgary AB, 1987 (page 134)


In 1954, at the age of 50, Illingworth Kerr and his colleague Stan Perrot travelled to Provincetown, Massachusetts, to take a course with the famed abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann. Kerr, a more traditional painter, was fully aware of the burgeoning modernist movement taking hold in the broader art world and how it was influencing his students. He sought to understand it directly from one of its most notable proponents. The lessons Kerr learned from Hofmann, particularly the principle to “construct with planes”, would influence him for the remainder of his career. From 1954 to 1964, Kerr described his practice as “adventurous” and actively sought to incorporate elements of modernism into his work. Hofmann’s teachings on pictorial structure, the importance of tensions between form and colour, and the role of intuition lead Kerr's explorations.


Kerr's particular brand of abstraction often remained somewhat rooted in form. In his use of automatic painting techniques, Kerr frequently found himself surprised by the symbolic imagery that emerged when he stepped back from a completed canvas, titling his works accordingly. Here, in his 1962 canvas, Kerr references Prometheus, the Titan who created mortals from clay and delivered fire to them from Mount Olympus, in a colourful and textural abstraction that reflects an artist constantly engaged in the exploration of his practice.

Illingworth Holey Kerr was born in Lumsden, Saskatchewan in 1905. Kerr attended the Central Technical School, Toronto, and from 1924 to 1927 at the Ontario College of Art under teachers Arthur Lismer, J.E.H. MacDonald, Frederick Varley and J.W. Beatty. He also studied at Westminster School of Art, London, in 1936.

 

Kerr taught at the Vancouver School of art from 1945 to 1947 and then came to Calgary to assume the role as director of the Art Department at the Provincial Institute of Technology (now the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology). Under Kerr, the Art Department split from the technical institute to become the Alberta College of Art (now the Alberta University of the Arts). Though still administrated by The Tech, Kerr believed that the art school's programming would gain the recognition it deserved if given autonomy from the technical college. In the end he was right—the school became an independent college in 1985.

 

Illingworth Kerr is best known for his prairie and foothills landscapes but he also dabbled in abstraction, and painted people and animals. His early landscape style reflects the influence of Lawren Harris and Kerr's exposure to the Group while in Ontario. He applied paint heavily, giving relief to an otherwise flat, spatial quality in his work. In later works Kerr used a broken brushstroke style that created visual tension to counteract this two dimensionality.

 

Kerr retired from teaching in 1967. He was given and honorary doctorate from the University of Calgary in 1973, and named to the Order of Canada in 1983. Harvest of the Spirit, a retrospective exhibition was shown at nine major public galleries in 1985. His work can be found in the collections of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton, the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, amongst many others

 

Illingworth Kerr died in Calgary in 1989.