©1993 Prior Editions

"Shadbolt's monsters, beasts and bugs often crawl across a blasted landscape, survivors of some awful apocalypse. They are creatures of nightmares and the unconscious. They thrive on repression and destruction. But some of them are symbols of life's renewal, like the butterfly, or of the wisdom of living in harmony with nature, like the owl. Above all, they are to be encountered as forces within ourselves. Neither good nor bad, the inner beasts are irrational and demand respect. Whether they appear as devouring monsters or wise and gentle birds and butterflies depends on us and how we treat nature in our world and in our dreams." - Scott Watson, Guest Curator, Jack Shadbolt: Bugs, Birds & Beasts, Artists for Kids Gallery, 1997.

 Elegy for an Island, 1985

Jack Shadbolt was born in 1909 in Shoeburyness, England, and came to Canada in 1912. The young Shadbolt was raised in Victoria, British Columbia. His father was a craftsman and his mother a dressmaker. Shadbolt struggled to be understood in a culture that, when he began, was not ready for modern art. He studied in New York, London, and Paris. During World War II he was in charge of the Canadian Army War Artists in London, including the photographs from the death camps. Shadbolt taught at the Vancouver School of Art from 1938 to 1966 and was an important contributor to the development of abstraction and modernism in this region and in Canada. Shadbolt's work is represented in all major public collections in Canada and in numerous corporate and private collections, and is handled by the Bau-Xi Gallery, Vancouver and Toronto.

"For over six decades, Jack Shadbolt has sought to articulate the language of form. His search has led him to a diverse array of creative solutions that express his ultimate goal - the evocation of experience. For Shadbolt, the experiences evoked through his imagery are those of both artist and viewer, as well as in a larger sense the shared experiences of the collective unconscious. He sees form as a conveyor of meaning that can stimulate multi-leveled responses - resonances and associations woven into the fabric of memory, myth and imagination. The constant in Shadbolt's image-making - the thread that binds his works over time, place and style - is the concept of a struggle between two poles of expression. Structure emerges at different moments to dominate, control the flow, only to have the spontaneous erupt forth unfettered at a later moment. The tension between design strictures and organic flux has not only informed the artist's oeuvre but has given impetus to the dynamic of development.

"On one level, Shadbolt's paintings participate in the international dialogue of twentieth century modernism and post modernism. His imagery, which is theoretically and technically linked to Picasso, the Surrealists, and the New York school, probes a vocabulary that explicates the modern condition. Even the personal paradox of structure opposing flux partakes of issues foregrounded in twentieth century art: formalism vs. expressionism, rationalism vs. irrationalism - placing Shadbolt in the mainstream of contemporary discourse. At the same time, however, he is an avowed regionalist. His earlier social realism represented both a rejection of Group of Seven "academicism" and a concern for social issues. Furthermore, his primitivism - a pivotal component of his abstraction - emerged with a regional focus that was engaged. Unlike his eastern contemporaries, Shadbolt's primitivist interests were local - Northwest Coast aboriginal art. Even his 1980's works, which in a global sense can be seen as connected to the ecological movement, are site specific. They represent the landscape of B.C."

-- A. J. Kristiansen, 1990, exhibition catalogue