Driven to Abstraction: The Art of Eleanor Mackey 1932 – 2014
July 4 – 18, 2015, WKP Kennedy Gallery, North Bay, Ontario
In 2015 a retrospective of Eleanor Mackey’s works was held at the WKP Kennedy Gallery in North Bay, Ontario. Below is are images and words from the show.
Opening Night:
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Early Years:
Eleanor’s fascination with colour and light started early:
The Moon Tonight
By Eleanor D. Johnston, 13 yrs old
As I gaze into the sky tonight
I see the moon so full and bright
Racing it seems, with the stars so bright,
And the reflection from the generous light
Casting a circle on the clouds, so white.
The circle is lined with purple and gold
While inside it seems so white and cold
Like the pulp of an apple before it gets old.
This sight of the moon tonight I will hold,
This silvery moon and its circle of gold.
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Eleanor “Elly” Mackey passed away in September 2014 after a long life of passion and creativity. Elly was a painter all her life. At the same time she was also a wife, a mother of five children, a teacher and she pursued many other creative activities. As the family moved around Ontario with her educator husband she took courses and became involved in the local art scenes.
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Her highly respected representational work in the 1950s led to a secondary school teaching position at O’Neill Collegiate and Vocational Institute in Oshawa after her graduation from Toronto Teacher’s College in 1963. She had her first solo exhibition in Oshawa. During this time she began exploring abstraction.
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“I would look at the sunlight coming through the tree branches. This is where my epiphanies began. I would look into the tree with the light coming through it, and I noticed that the light, the sunlight, was eating the tree. It was absorbing the tree – the darkness of the tree and the light was just flowing through and melting the tree. You can see the struggle I was having, getting those negative shapes. I didn’t know at the time that it was called negative shapes, I hadn’t been to art school yet! But I knew what I saw. The light gobbling up reality.”- Eleanor Mackey
NEW SCHOOL OF ART:
Exploring transparent layers, progressive curve structures and gradual movements of colour.
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When Eleanor took a three year art course at the New School of Art in Toronto in the mid 1960s her work radically changed. Influenced by some of the most innovative Toronto artists as teachers she discovered her distinctive curvilinear style and began to paint large colour field abstracts.
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