Lot 267: "William Percival (W.P.) Weston 1879 - 1967

"William Percival (W.P.) Weston 1879 - 1967 Canadian oil on canvas Yale, BC" "36 1/4 x 40 1/2 inches 92.1 x 102.9 centimeters signed and on verso signed, titled and inscribed """"1419 Dogwood Ave., Vancouver, BC"""" Literature:Thirty-Second Annual Exhibition, British Columbia Society of Artists, Vancouver Art Gallery, 1942, listed, unpaginated Provenance:R. Arkell, for Kelly Douglas Co. Private Collection, Vancouver Exhibited:Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia Society of Artists, Thirty-Second Annual Exhibition, May 15 - 31, 1942, catalogue #55 Royal Canadian Academy, Toronto, 1942 Allied Officers Club, Vancouver, 1943 Vancouver Art Gallery, Exhibition by W.P. Weston, ARCA, November 12 - December 1, 1946, catalogue #28 W.P. Weston's career as an art educator in Vancouver afforded him the freedom to paint, and most importantly, the freedom to paint what he wanted. Weston was fascinated by British Columbia's mountains and rugged coastline, and his unique vision of this landscape is expressed n this powerful canvas in which primeval, towering mountains wreathed by cloud plunge into the water at the bottom of the Fraser Canyon. Weston gives the mountains a visceral muscularity in the sculpted shapes of their rocky flanks, and the inclusion of the farmhouse at the base gives a further sense of their grand scale. As opposed to Lawren Harris, who expressed geometric form and spiritual symbolism in his mountains, Weston sought to capture the specific, individual nature of his mountains rather than the abstract. He studied how the elements molded them, and was enthralled by the ephemeral changes in light sweeping across them. Until his retirement from teaching in 1946, Weston made weekly sketching trips to the environs of Vancouver and Victoria for the vital raw material for large canvases such as this dramatic work. Weston's reverent, heroic mountain paintings capture the unique nature of the Canadian landscape. "