Alexandra Luke | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Margaret Alexandra Luke 14 May 1901 Montreal, Quebec, Canada |
| Died | June 1, 1967 (aged 66) Oshawa, Ontario, Canada |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Known for | Painting |
| Movement | Abstract expressionism |
| Spouses | Marcus Everett Smith (m. 1925–1926)Clarence Ewart McLaughlin (m. 1929) |
Alexandra Luke (14 May 1901 - 1 June 1967), born Margaret Alexandra Luke in Montreal, Quebec, [1] was a Canadian abstract artist who belonged to the Painters Eleven.
Luke was born in Montreal, one of a pair of twins, to parents Jesse Herbert Ritson Luke and Emma Russell Long. [2] After she had finished high school in 1914, the family settled in Oshawa, Ontario. Soon after, both Alexandra and her twin sister Isobel began nurse's training at Columbia Hospital for Women in Washington, D.C.
After her graduation, Luke returned to Oshawa and married Marcus Everett Smith. Their marriage was short lived, as Smith died suddenly four months into their marriage, but Luke gave birth to his son, Richard, in 1926. [3] Soon after, she was courted by Clarence Ewart McLaughlin, son of George W. McLaughlin and grandson of Robert McLaughlin, the founder of the McLaughlin Carriage Company. The couple married in 1928 and had their first child, Mary, in 1930.
Luke began to create art in her late 20s. Inspired by two local artists, Dorothy Van Luven and Dorothy Henderson, [2] she began to paint and organize arts classes around the city. She helped build the arts community in Oshawa and became a member of several boards and societies, including the Oshawa Women's Lyceum Club and Oshawa Historical Society.
Luke painted landscapes in a large, third floor studio in her and her husband's home and soon discovered abstract art after visiting modernist exhibitions in Toronto and Ottawa. Desperate to be seen as more than a hobbyist painter, she sought out a portfolio review by landscape artist Caven Atkins in 1944. Atkins spoke to her bluntly and told her that her Group of Seven-inspired style was not viable. [2] This pushed her to further explore abstraction and receive formal art training at the Banff School of Fine Arts (renamed Banff Centre) in 1945, then at the Hans Hofmann School of Art in 1947. From Hofmann's teachings, she began to understand how to create energy in her paintings with colour, texture and the use of white space as well as formal structure. [4]
She began to exhibit her work in the early 1950s at different venues, including the Canadian Group of Painters and the Picture Loan Society. [3] In 1952, she organized the first Canadian Abstract Exhibition, where she met many of the members that would form the Painters Eleven. With this group, she was inspired to create more paintings, and she was able to showcase her works in a wide range of venues in the United States and Canada. She championed the promotion of Canadian abstract art and had a "strengthening, inspirational" [3] role in the group.
In the Canadian Abstract Exhibition catalogue, she wrote:
"...more beauty and interest is to be found in the negative space created by the object than in the positive...Painting should not stop with the already discovered beauty, but should continue searching. [5]
In 1980, her work Symphony (1957) (Robert McLaughlin Gallery) in the Painters Eleven in Retrospect exhibition was praised as "the surprise of the exhibition", demonstrating many of the virtues of Painters Eleven at their best: "their ambition to make painting more autonomous, like music; their marvellous freedom and fluidity of touch; their modest directness in relation to the subject; their freedom to move anywhere their inspiration took them". [6]
Luke continued to paint and support abstract art until her death from ovarian cancer on 1 June 1967. She had created a sizable volume of work and participated in over 80 group exhibitions and solo shows. She had also been accepted into prestigious arts societies, including the Canadian Group of Painters in 1959 and the Ontario Society of Artists in 1960. [2]
Shortly before her death, Luke and her husband Ewart offered major financial support and works from their own collection toward the creation of a public art gallery for the City of Oshawa. This became The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, named after Ewart's grandfather, in 1967. [7]
William Ronald Smith, known professionally as William Ronald, was an important Canadian painter, best known as the founder of the influential Canadian abstract art group Painters Eleven in 1953 and for his abstract expressionist "central image" paintings. He was the older brother of painter John Meredith (1933–2000).
Painters Eleven was a group of abstract artists active in Canada between 1953 and 1960. They are associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement.
Kazuo Nakamura was a Japanese-Canadian painter and sculptor and a founding member of the Toronto-based Painters Eleven group in the 1950s. Among the first major Japanese Canadian artists to emerge in the twentieth century, Nakamura created innovative landscape paintings and abstract compositions inspired by nature, mathematics, and science. His painting is orderly and restrained in contrast to other members of Painters Eleven. His idealism about science echoed the beliefs of Lawren Harris and Jock Macdonald.
Ray Mead (1921–1998) was a Canadian abstract expressionist painter and a member of the artists group known as Painters Eleven. In his work, he often used a high horizon line as a structural element.
Thomas Hodgson was a Canadian sprint canoer who gained his first Canadian title in 1941 and competed in the 1950s, and also one of the acclaimed Canadian artists known as Painters Eleven. Competing in two Summer Olympics, he earned his best finish of eighth in the C-2 1000 m event at Helsinki in 1952.
Isabel McLaughlin, was a Modernist Canadian painter, patron and philanthropist. She specialized in landscapes and still life and had a strong interest in design.
The Robert McLaughlin Gallery is a public art gallery in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada. It is the largest public art gallery in the Regional Municipality of Durham, of which Oshawa is a part. The gallery houses a significant collection of Canadian contemporary and modern artwork. Housed in a building designed by noted Canadian architect Arthur Erickson, the collection focuses on works by Painters Eleven, who were founded in the Oshawa studio of Painters Eleven member Alexandra Luke.
Milly Ristvedt, also known as Milly Ristvedt-Handerek, is a Canadian abstract painter. Ristvedt lives and paints in Ontario, where she is represented by the Oeno Gallery. A monograph covering a ten-year retrospective of her work, Milly Ristvedt-Handerek: Paintings of a Decade, was published by the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in 1979. In 2017, a second monograph was published by Oeno Gallery which included a survey of paintings from 1964 through to 2016, Milly Ristvedt, Colour and Meaning : an incomplete palette.
Alex Cameron is a visual artist living and working in Toronto, Ontario. He is a member of what has been described as the third generation of artists inspired in their painting style by Jack Bush. During the first part of his career, Cameron fashioned elegantly drawn shapes into abstractions; in the latter part of his career, influenced by Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, he sought to delineate landscape in his semi-abstract work.
Walter Yarwood was a Canadian abstract painter and a founding member of Painters Eleven. Yarwood became known for his painting beginning in the 1950s. During the 1960s he completed a number of public sculptures in Ontario, Quebec and Manitoba.
John Meredith Smith, known professionally as John Meredith, was a Canadian abstract expressionist painter. His trademark as a painter was rich, exciting colour which he combined with loosely figurative images of vertical stripes and forms or idiosyncratic calligraphy. He often used a small coloured ink drawing divided into squares as a template from which to develop his large canvases. In 1966, he began using details from still-wet drawings he had smudged – a way of working he regarded as his invention.
Gordon Rayner was a Canadian abstract expressionist painter. His way of creating art was idiosyncratic and characterized by constant innovation and often by transformation of his medium. Later, he integrated realism into his practice.
Dennis Burton was a Canadian modernist painter.
Richard Gorman was a Canadian painter and printmaker. He was known for his magnetic prints which he created using ink covered ball-bearings manipulated with a magnet held behind the drawing board and for his large abstract paintings in which he broadly handled paint.
Lowrie Warrener was a Canadian painter who was a pioneer of modernism, along with Kathleen Munn and Bertram Brooker.
Paul Sloggett is a Canadian abstract painter known for his use of geometric shapes and patterns in creating paintings and for his many teaching and administrative appointments at OCAD University, Toronto.
Daniel Solomon is an abstract painter who uses intense, vibrant colour in his work, combined with complex, pictorial space, inspired by artists such as Jack Bush and is a painter and professor in Drawing and Painting at OCAD University.
John MacGregor (1942-2019) was an artist, known for his paintings, prints and sculptures, and as a member of the Isaacs Gallery Group in Toronto.
Gordon Webber was a multimedia pioneer of modernism in Canada. He was also an educator.
Ann Clarke is a Canadian artist, who creates vibrant gestural abstract paintings and drawings which reveal her formal interests as well as a fascination with twenty-first century technologies. She is also an educator.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Artists | |
| Other | |
