Jean Albert McEwen 1923 - 1999

Private Collection, Quebec City

Roald Nasgaard and Ray Ellenwood, The Automatiste Revolution, Varley Art Gallery, 2009, pp. 82 and 85

This canvas is in very good condition with no apparent issues under UV. The lower left corner is buckling slightly and there is a dent to the surface. There are two slight fold marks in the center.
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McEwen was a member of Les Automatistes when he came into his artistic maturity in the early 1950's.

The influence in this fine work comes from McEwen's interest in the series of "Weeping Willow" paintings that the French artist Claude Monet did from 1918 to 1919.

Nasgaard comments that all these works:

are based on a single flattened tree trunk strategically placed so that it vertically bisects the canvas, leaving wide vertical columns on either side which the artist filled with a lusciously dense profusion of paint swirls suggesting the willow tree's hanging foliage.

In his later works, such as this one, they are infused with recollections of Monet and, as Nasgaard continues:

these compositional terms and endlessly sensuous variations on them, governed McEwen's paintings for the rest of his life.