Harold Barling Town 1924 - 1990

Town's large paintings of the early 1960s created a sensation when they were shown, and his exhibition at the Laing Galleries in Toronto in 1962 was a frenzy that saw everything bought by avid collectors and institutions within a matter of minutes after it opened.  Canadian art had rarely seen work of such large scale, heroic gesture, and sheer brilliance.  Successful shows in New York and London followed.

In a 1966 catalogue essay, Harry Malcolmson writes of Town's work from this period, including The Mediator:

Town's characteristic method of constructing a canvas is the contrast of opposites.  His approach is not to take a single idea and lay it out.  Instead, Town employs a colour, a shape, or a texture and then introduces its opposite and its opposite and so on.  From there on a struggle ensues whereby Town, to succeed, must wrestle apparent irreconcilables into visual coherence.  This technique of synthesis, antithesis, and resolution seems to me to account for the fact that a Town canvas often seems a contest, an argument, a clash of opposed wills.  Town will introduce a colour so brilliant, so brittle and powerful, that it seemingly must overbalance his picture, then with astonishing virtuosity and dexterity he will introduce some contrasting new elements that magically create a new equilibrium.