Shadbolt's ghosts

Nobody could call the paintings in The Ghost Universe cheerful, portraying as they do "crawling insects, totemic shapes and stick figures contained in fields of colliding forces." The allusions, according to the description of the Jack Shadbolt exhibition now on at the Equinox Gallery, are to environmental destruction, war and the collisions of indigenous and colonial cultures.

Why, then, did I find it all vaguely comforting? The paintings were done between 1949 and 1959, after Shadbolt had spent time in war-bombed London, going through Holocaust images for the Canadian military. A quote excerpted for the show revealed what he was thinking at the time --  about "growing tensions in the world situation," an "undercurrent of unrest and unfilfillment in our contemporary society," and the problem of individuals adjusting "to a disheartening complex society."  

Yesterday, today -- the issues are the same, slightly reworded. To see that understanding encapsulated in beautifully realized paintings, neatly displayed in the serene white space of the gallery's great hall, is, somehow, wonderful.

One of the paintings in the show. I see unhappy faces, a dog perhaps, and maybe some insects, but  I don't pretend to understand it.  In a 1980 interview,  Jack Shadbolt  told art historian Ian Thom that  seeing the ruins of bombed-out London helped even him understand the nature of abstraction. "When the bomb blows the building apart it abstracts it, the pieces fall back together again and you get a memory image of what was there but vastly altered and psychologically made infinitely more intense than the original thing."

The quote on the gallery wall that made me wonder whether Shadbolt, who died in 1998, was speaking contemporaneously.

Outside the Equinox Gallery's new location on Great Northern Way. The clouds were scudding over the mountains, and the colourful graffiti looked like outdoor art. John, who took the photo, says he always finds something to photograph from this parking lot.