Harold Barling Town 1924 - 1990

The Estate of Harold Town, Toronto

The painting is in excellent condition. There is some vertical craquellure along the extreme right edge where the canvas is pulled around the frame. Under UV, there are two diagonal lines that fluoresce brighter under the black diagonal line in the upper right. These are likely touch-ups by the artist.
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By 1956, Town was in his early thirties, and in full flight as an artist.  Behind him lay the years immediately after the Ontario College of Art, his collisions with other artists with like ambitions, and the years of unrelenting, ceaseless work in every medium.  Town was making his soon-to-be-prize-winning Single Autographic Prints incessantly, with increasingly rich and gorgeous results through the early 1950s.  He also made numerous etchings, collages, sculptures, and, most of all, drawings.  He was brimming with confidence and energy, as his work poured forth.

This year, 1956, was also the year in which Oscar Cahén, perhaps the most important single influence on Town's development as an artist, died tragically in a car accident.  The two were often together. Cahén's sophistication, talent, and knowledge of contemporary European art movements, gave both focus and direction to Town's undoubted abilities as a draughtsman.  The formation of Painters Eleven in the fall of 1953 owes much to Cahén, and it proved to be the springboard not only for Town, but for Jack Bush, Kazuo Nakamura, WIlliam Ronald, Tom Hodgson, Ray Mead, and Jock Macdonald, among others.

Wall Jumping is a vivacious example of Town's precocity and invention at this critical time in his life.  His ability to combine so many disparate elements with such éclat is a hallmark of his later work and of his work generally.  He had a compelling sense of drama, of being on the stage and creating an event or situation that was both attention-grabbing and yet with residual depth that invited longer meditation.  The colours he used were distinctively clashing and unlike those of his fellow artists, and his shapes and figures, although many of them had started with Cahén, were now the product of his own fervid imagination. His compositional skills, so forcefully on display here, were already sensational, and would develop even more in the next several years.