When I first visited the Shadbolt Art Center, an art installation located in Burnaby’s scenic Deer Lake Park months ago, I had no idea that the center is named after two highly influential Burnaby artists and art lovers: Jack. Shadbolt and his wife, Doris Shadbolt.
So when I saw a book on Jack Shadbolt by Scott Watson on a recent trip to the library, I didn’t think twice about picking it up.
Born to English parents on February 4, 1909, in Shoeburyness, a village in the county of Essex in England, Jack Shadbolt was the second of five siblings. He moved to Canada with his family in 1912. The idea of emigrating to Canada was his mother’s; a dressmaker, a strong and religious Christian woman and the dominant figure in her family whose strict work ethic and perfectionist and religious views would persecute and repress Jack and create in him a restlessness that would lead him to “create” at all times.
She created to escape the rigidity of her home and the feeling of inadequacy instilled in her by her mother’s domineering and demanding personality. As a child, Jack often escaped into nature and into the open air, he also fled to a world of imagination and fantasy, enjoying exotic, fantastic and oriental tales. He was drawn to darkness and cruelty, and this would be shown later in his paintings.
Jack’s father was a sign painter and paper hanger, and Jack often helped him with his work. Between her mother’s sewing, her father’s painting, and her sisters’ fondness for playing the piano, Shadbolt grew up in an artistic home. The Shadbolts first lived in Nelson British Columbia for two years, before moving to Victoria.
In addition to commercial art, as a teenager, Jack loved sports and even had Olympic aspirations in athletics. In 1927, he enrolled at Victoria College and met Max Maynard. Maynard would become his good friend and first mentor of modern art. His ideas and passion would inspire Jack’s decision to become an artist himself. With Maynard, he met Emily Carr and would later write a review about her work.
The book, A Canadian Art Movement: The Story of the Group of Seven by FB Housser’s had a very strong impact on both Jack and Maynard, as the book’s storylines made the art seem masculine and heroic at a time when in Victoria, art was in the hands of the women of society.
In 1931, Jack moved to Vancouver to work as a teacher for a year. During that time he took courses with one of his idols, Fred Varley, a founding member of the Group of Seven. Unfortunately, this would turn out to be a humiliating and depressing experience for him, as Varley continued to ignore him, refusing to criticize his work until finally, at the end of the course, he simply ripped up Jack’s drawings and threw them on the ground. Later, Shadbolt would have a habit of destroying his own paintings.
Jack Shadbolt would continue to move and travel, teaching, visiting exhibitions, taking courses, all to mature as an artist. He studied in New York, Paris and London, and even considered traveling to Mexico to study with Diego Rivera, whose mural Man at the Crossroads of Civilization was removed from Rockefeller Center during Jack’s stay in New York.
Shadbolt experimented with various styles and techniques. However, he remained uneasy about his art and his role as an artist, feeling very strongly that art must address universal issues, express the human condition, and be oriented toward social engagement.
He is quoted in Scott Waston’s book to say:
“I think of painting as something essentially noble and dignified, necessarily cold and distant in its essence but animated by passionate human motives, something where color and form and the inevitable ‘architectural’ elements take over … There is no softness in art There is tenderness, there is voluptuousness … there is sometimes the greatness and severity of the controlling impulse, the tremendous burden of the spirit that governs with titanic majesty and sweeps away all the painter’s resources in one unity and his maximum dignity. “
Jack enlisted in the army as a signalman in 1942. In May 1944, instead of getting a job as an official war artist, he got the job of storyteller. Later, he would finally get the war artist job. The war of 1945 worried him deeply, and when he was transferred abroad to London, he helped with administrative tasks and witnessed the ruins that were the result of the war.
He documented his impressions by outlining the destruction left by the bombs. His work as a war artist meant that he had to look at photographs of the concentration camps that were sent to him on a daily basis as the army documented his advance. The images were violent, cruel and devastating, and his job was to catalog and classify them.
He painted the local scene in Vancouver in a series he called The Canadian Scene.
In 1947 he moved away from the social realism of the images in The Canadian Scene and returned to the theme of war. He painted a mural for the United Service Recreation Center called About Town with United Services. The mural that no longer exists took six months to complete. During this period, he would combine the destruction he saw in London with scenes and buildings in Vancouver. Some of my personal favorites include his drawings of dogs among ruins; the accidental survivors of the war and the symbolic representations of the aggressive forces that controlled the world at that time.
Jack often drew on medieval, oceanic, native, and African sources. Later he would dedicate himself to drawing masks and skeletons of birds. This came after a period where Jack had spent time drawing driftwood on the beach, stumps, and tangled branches in Buccaneer Bay. These images were figurative abstractions of the bones and skeletons of a mutilated man.
In 1948, his exhibition at the Toronto Art Gallery revealed his stylistic transition from realism to expressionism while employing symbolism in his art. This shift brought him into the public eye as one of Canada’s leading modern painters and a national and international contributor to Canadian art and abstraction.
Jack Shadbolt passed away at the age of 89, on November 22, 1998. His development as an artist and his motives can be traced by looking at his paintings. Scott Watson’s book includes a wealth of information about the artist and some of his most beautiful works.