Prairie

For the next few blogs, I thought that I would write about some of the artworks of Marcelin’s that I own and how I came to own them. The first one I would like to discuss is the first large work of Marcelin’s that I bought that being, “Prairie” (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Prairie 1974. Acrylic on canvas. 129.5 x 129.5 cm.

Marcelin painted Prairie in 1974, and it measures 129.5 x 129.5 cm (51 x 51 inches). It is acrylic on canvas. Over a green background, three rectangular blocks have been placed in the upper right-hand corner (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Detail of the upper right-hand corner of Prairie

The grey block is more forward and overlaps the yellow block on the left and the blue block on the right. The grey block has the most surface texture followed by the yellow then the blue. Marcelin has signed his name on the grey block. To my eye, the forward, central position and the greater texturing results in the grey block being more dominant than the other two brighter coloured blocks.

In the green background there is an intensity gradient in the green colour from the bottom right corner to the upper left corner (Fig. 1). The green in the lower right is lighter with more yellow where the upper left is a darker green. Brushstrokes give motion from the lower centre towards the upper left and to a lesser extent towards the three blocks.

Given that Marcelin was originally from Saskatchewan, this painting evokes silos (the blocks of colour) in a field of spring wheat with the brushstrokes representing wind blowing through the stalks of green wheat. This would be the long-stem wheats of Marcelin’s prairie childhood as the high-yielding, short-stalk wheats didn’t become generally available until the mid-1950s through research carried out by Dr. Norman Borlaug for the Rockefeller Foundation. Dr. Borlaug received the Nobel Prize in 1970 for his contributions to agriculture (Heiser, 1973). So, this painting could be seen as a prairie landscape from Marcelin’s childhood.

Prairie has a sister painting, if you will, “Rairie”, which Marcelin painted in 1980. Rairie is now in the collection of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Rairie is wider than it is tall (52 x 71 cm) and it includes collage but shares an almost identical green background with Prairie and has a single “silo” in the foreground. (https://macrepertoire.macm.org/oeuvre/rairie/).

Prairie also brings an image of Andrew Wyeth’s 1948 painting, “Christina’s World”, to my mind. (https://www.moma.org/collection/works/78455).

I bought Prairie from Marcelin in 1977 or 78; I don’t remember exactly. Marcelin’s first acrylic on canvas painting was “Tristan” which he completed in 1971. It has an orange background with two coloured blocks, one red and the other blue. It too did not contain collage. So, Prairie is one of Marcelin's earliest acrylics. Tristan is in the estate of the artist.

With the exception of the years 1981 – 1984 when I lived in the USA, Prairie has had a prominent spot on the walls of my various dwellings. It has held out the hope of spring during many cold Canadian winters.

Reference

Heiser, C.B. Jr., 1973. Seed to Civilization, the Story of Man’s Food. W.H. Freeman and Co., San Francisco, CA. 243 pp.