Tom Thomson by David Silcox

Author:David Silcox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2017-07-31T04:00:00+00:00

Early Winter Frost 1914 | Oil on wood, 21.7 × 26.8 cm

Untitled c. 1915 | Oil on panel, 21.6 × 26.7 cm

Maple Saplings, October 1916 | Oil on canvas, 91.4 × 102 cm

Unfinished Work

Unfinished Sketch presents an opportunity to support my 1965 thesis that Thomson’s pattern of creative evolution would have brought him well in advance of New York painters to a form of Abstract Expressionism, in which the manipulation of paint on a two-dimensional surface amalgamated both the search and the goal of the creative act. However tempting the idea is as a theory, I believe this abstract is a perpendicular sky, an expression of Thomson’s frustration with the constricting act of poking paint into the interstices between the forms made by trees, rock, and thicket. In this unfinished work he was trying out the broad shapes of sky in a terrestrial situation and considering drawing over the abstract pattern, rather than filling in around drawing, whether it be the “absent drawing” made by the panel’s ground or the actual drawing that delineates shape. Even in this abortive experiment he could not resist a hot-lick highlight in the two forms in the dark area. No one can state with certainty what Thomson had in mind—even a living artist can form a barrier between understanding and his work—though unquestionably Unfinished Sketch can be designated as the first completely abstract work in Canadian art.

Late Autumn is an impatient study of the kind that gave rise to the abstract experiment. Areas between the branches are brusquely smacked into place, and the foreground is similar to the treatment of Unfinished Sketch. Much of the force in Thomson is a by-product of that desperation that comes to the artist when a picture is finishing itself well short of aspiration.

—H.T.

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