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AC-79-17 by William Perehudoff

Artwork by William Perehudoff, AC-79-17

William Perehudoff
AC-79-17

acrylic on canvas
signed and inscribed “AC-79-17” on the reverse
54 x 64 ins ( 137.2 x 162.6 cms )

Auction Estimate: $15,000.00$10,000.00 - $15,000.00

Price Realized $15,340.00
Sale date: May 29th 2018

Provenance:
Waddington Galleries, Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto
Literature:
Roald Nasgaard, Abstract Painting in Canada, Toronto, 2007, page 290
Perehudoff began his artistic career as a watercolourist while continuing to experiment with transparencies and opacities in pigments throughout his later career as a colour field painter. Using unprimed canvases, the artist worked with the absorption of the raw linen with thin application of pigment. Large swaths of thinned neutral earth-tone pigments create a soft foundation layer to the composition with soft curving lines created from the movement of the brush. Creating vibrant contrast and energy, the artist places bright horizontal bars of solid bright pigments of contrasting blues, greens and fiery orange at the edges of the work. Purposefully placed, these elements draw the eye of the viewer over the composition, constantly moving and negotiating the relationship between the forms and colours. It is as if the bright bars of colour float in front of the neutral background and appear to be floating in space. In a final layer to the piece, Perehudoff has added a pearl-like neutral acrylic to the surface of the work. Utilizing a variety of wide and fine palette knives, the artist has applied very thin layers of the medium to highlight the verticality and horizontality of the forms within the artwork by way of thin lines of excess medium left from scraping. The three-dimensional quality of the final surface layer adds a sculptural element to the work giving further dimension to the image plane.

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William Perehudoff
(1919 - 2013) RCA

HighlightsWatch Artist

William Perehudoff was born in Langham, Saskatchewan and maintained a connection to this area throughout his life. In 1944, the Saskatoon Art Centre opened, and this provided Perehudoff with early and important access to art. Within a couple of years he was exhibiting regularly in group exhibitions such as the Saskatoon Exhibition and the Art Centre fall show. Throughout this phase of his development as an artist, he farmed in the summer and devoted himself to painting and his art education in the winter. Like many artists of the time, Perehudoff had been influenced by the motivations and methodologies of social realist artists such as Diego Rivera.  Perehudoff took instruction from the influential French muralist Jean Charlot, as well as Amédé Ozenfant in New York, the French Purist and associate of Le Corbusier.  Kenneth Noland, a very important colour field painter, was also a major influence to his work. Since the 1960s, Perehudoff was a central figure in Canadian abstraction. The effect of the flat plains and open skies that are so dramatically present throughout Saskatchewan seem to be detectable in his work. William Perehudoff received the Saskatchewan Order of Merit in 1994 and an honorary doctorate from the University of Regina in 2003. He was named a Member of the Order of Canada in 1998.