THE CITY’S GREAT ARTIST
Jack Shadbolt played pivotal role in modern Canadian art scene
In 1989, Jack Shadbolt was made the 19th freeman of the City of Vancouver. He really liked the idea of an artist, as he said, “belonging to a city.” It reminded him of how other artists were honoured by their cities, such as Hieronymus Bosch by Hertogenbosch in The Netherlands and Michelangelo by Florence, Italy.
Shadbolt even made a joke about it. “To paraphrase W. C. Fields,” he said, “a city that values its artists cannot be all bad.”
About nine years later, just after Shadbolt died, curator and writer Scott Watson said that Shadbolt had the power to both reveal the crisis of the human condition and to heal it.
“He insisted that the artist was a citizen whose voice should be heard, and he was determined that art secure a place in the life of society,” wrote Watson in The Vancouver Sun.
“Jack Shadbolt’s own place in Canadian art is secure. He is our last great modern painter — 20thcentury art in Canada is inconceivable without him.”
Shadbolt was born in 1909 in Shoeburyness, England by the mouth of the Thames.
Three years later, his family emigrated to Canada. After two years in Nelson, the family settled in Victoria.
As a youngster, Shadbolt showed he was talented in art. As a teenager, he occasionally painted in Emily Carr’s backyard.
By 1949, the magazine Art News called him “the leading avant garde artist” in Vancouver.
By then, he had been married to Doris Meisel for five years. She went on to become an influential curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery and author of the biography The Art of Emily Carr. For many years, they were among the city’s power art couples.
As an artist, Shadbolt was always influenced by place and the coastal landscape.
Toni Onley, a friend and fellow artist, said that Shadbolt was “always with creepy crawlies, his butterfly series, that kind of thing. He really got off on rotting vegetation in the woods. That is what inspired him. He was a product of Emily Carr, I think.”
While Shadbolt painted, he listened to music, often Brahms. Sometimes it was jazz or even rock ’n’ roll.
Jack and Doris’ legacy lives on. In 1988, they started the VIVA Awards funded by the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts.
It continues to grant an annual award of $12,000 to an artist for outstanding accomplishment and achievement.