The gallery’s latest online exhibition features a collection of work by Catharine McAvity.
(Saint John) This latest online exhibition from Peter Estey Fine Art comes at a time when several factors make a re-examination of McAvity’s work important, including a renewed interest in contemporary landscape painting by a younger generation of international painters. The works in this exhibition consist of several watercolours and two major works on canvas from the artist’s estate.
McAvity’s work exists as a parallel document to the traditional Canadian landscape canon, situated in a particular lineage starting with David Milne (1882-1953) and developed alongside K.M. Graham (1913-2008). These artists share a lightness of approach while utilizing colour and form to negotiate landscape in an abstract manner. In the work of Catharine McAvity, natural forms are rendered down to their basic elements of line, shape, and colour. The formal gestures constructing the paintings, although referring to a source, become abstracted entities unto themselves. There is effortlessness in McAvity’s work, a simplicity of approach that is calm, confident, and mysterious.
View the exhibition.
About Catharine McAvity
Catharine McAvity (1915-1999) was a significant and prolific artist who lived and worked in Rothesay, New Brunswick. In her formative years, she studied at Mount Allison University and independently with several prominent artists including Jack Humphrey and Miller Brittain. Her work has been exhibited widely and is held in numerous public collections including The Beaverbrook Art Gallery, The New Brunswick Museum, Owens Art Gallery, The Confederation Centre for the Arts in Charlottetown, PEI, and the Canada Council Art Bank. In 2010-11, a major retrospective of her work was organized by the New Brunswick Museum in Saint John, NB.
Exhibition on display until April 5, 2023.
Learn more at peteresteyfineart.com
