Feathers and Shell by Isabel McLaughlin

Born in Oshawa, Ontario, the daughter of Mr. & Mrs. R.S. McLaughlin, she studied at the Ontario College of Art, Toronto; the Art Students’ League, New York; the Scandinavian Academy, Paris, and in Mexico. She held her first solo show at the Art Gallery of Toronto in the winter of 1933, when the Toronto Globe notes, “Miss McLaughlin has become interested in a section of Canada, unexplored by artists, namely, Northern Ontario mining settlements. Kirkland Lake and Cobalt are represented in the group of paintings which also includes the Ottawa, Quebec, Muskoka, and Southern Ontario landscapes in the neighborhood of her home at Oshawa and in Toronto. City streets, which have held tenaciously to a few colorful cottages of an earlier day, standing wedged between newer structures have gained the interest of this young artist…. The work exhibits a fine sense of design – a quality well expressed in the still-life drawings and plant studies. A series of watercolors, named “Here and There in Toronto,” reveals the fact that the artist likes to place on canvas those familiar and unnoticed pictures that we meet and should see every day from windows or a street corner.”

Subsequently, she exhibited at Scott & Sons, Montreal jointly with Sarah Robertson, and Prudence Heward (1934); at Malloney Galleries, Toronto, with Rody Kenny Courtice, Kathleen Daly, Yvonne McKague and Paraskeva Clark (1936); Picture Loan Society, Toronto (1937). In 1933, she became a founding member of the Canadian Group of Painters and exhibited often with this society. In her earlier work, she was influenced by the Group of Seven but then she moved toward a more simplified modern approach. Even in the 1960’s, she was still very much interested in landscapes. She lived and died in Toronto. Represented in the collections of: National Gallery of Canada; Art Gallery of Ontario; Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s Univ., Kingston; The McMichael Conservation Collection, Kleinburg, Ont., and elsewhere.

Literature Source:
"A Dictionary of Canadian Artists, Volume 4: Little - Myles", compiled by Colin S. MacDonald, Canadian Paperbacks Publishing Ltd, Ottawa, 1978