The Owl and the Butterfly: Jack Shadbolt, In His Words

(Hardback)

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An intimately candid memoir about the ambitions, struggles, and achievements of one of Canada's most prolific and important modernist artists.

The Owl and The Butterfly is the memoir West Coast modernist Jack Shadbolt (19091998) never quite got around to writing. Using poems and excerpts from his personal journals, letters, talks, and writings, Vancouver-based critic Susan Mertens has created a compelling collage of the artist, a bildungsroman of an extraordinarily driven and divided personality navigating the rapidly changing social and artistic challenges of the 20th century.

Inspired initially by Emily Carr, Shadbolt put the West Coasts dramatic landscapes and elements of both Indigenous and Western culture through lenses of abstraction, cubism, and surrealism. The result was a highly original form of Modernism, outward looking in its international influences yet absolutely of this place, as comfortable at the Venice Biennale as in solo shows at Canadas major public galleries.

Through writing as colorful as his giant butterflies, as psychologically insightful as his bird poems, The Owl and the Butterfly reveals the ego and insecurity that plagued Shadbolt, a tightly wound combination that condemned him to a teeter-totter of near-manic productive highs and soul-deadening lows when he feared he would never again paint. It is the very human story of how the immigrant son of a sign painter worked tirelessly to turn "the sows ear of me ... into the silk purse of an artist" so that, one day, a viewer might be stopped in their tracks when, in his words, "the poetry breaks through" and a mute but magical act of communication occurs.

Featuring black-and-white photographs and sixteen pages of full-color selections of his paintings, this is the story of an artist obsessed from his late teens to his death bed with the question of how he might make great art, an artist who, at heart, wanted what we all desireto belong and to be understood.

Author Bio

Susan Mertens was born in Toronto and educated at the universities of Carleton, Guelph and British Columbia in Canada, and the University of Cambridge, England, in philosophy. She was a senior arts critic for twelve years with the Vancouver Sun, and it was early in this role when she first encountered Jack Shadbolt and his paintings. For twenty-five years she and Shadbolt enjoyed a professional friendship "talking aesthetics." She recalls: "Jack always said he had no small talk but he had a marathon stamina for meaningful art talk." Mertens lives in Lions Bay, British Columbia, Canada. The research and writing of this book were facilitated by a Doris and Jack Shadbolt Fellowship at Simon Fraser University.