Artwork for Sale
Still life with Fruit and Flowers
Inscriptions
signed, 'G. Roberts' (lower right)Provenance
Roberts Gallery, Toronto
Private collection, Town of Mount Royal, Quebec
By descent to private collection, Calgary
Goodridge Roberts was one of Canada’s most versatile artists, equally brilliant in his depiction of the still life as he was in the landscape as he was with the nude, usually but not exclusively the female.
In Norman McLaren’s 1991 publication titled On the Creative Process, edited by Donald McWilliams, Norman McLaren wrote:
“As a painter, one of your training is to see a thing as an abstract thing. When you look at a group of objects, it’s not just this object and that object, it’s also the relationship between the two, the shading, etc. You analyze it, it’s no longer a crucifix or a plant leaf. It’s a green shape with a curve and a darkening on one side. I think the painter automatically sees a scene as an abstraction — even in the process of doing a painting that is completely realistic.
In art, you want to stress some things which you feel are important. If you eliminate the things that aren’t important you arrive at the things you want to say very quickly.” [1]
This explains the excitement and challenges of an artist like Goodridge Roberts particularly in his paintings of still lifes, but in other subject matter as well.
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Footnote:
[1] Norman McLaren, On the Creative Process, ed. by Donald McWilliams (Montreal: National Film Board of Canada, 1991), 43.