Gershon Iskowitz’s (1921-1988) Parry Sound watercolours of the late 1950s - early 1960s belong to a pivotal period in the artist’s development, when his engagement with the Canadian landscape was beginning to give way to a more personalized and increasingly abstract visual language.Â
Iskowitz first travelled to the Parry Sound region in the mid-1950s and returned frequently, drawn to its rocky shorelines, dense forests, waterways, and expansive skies. The landscape provided a rich setting for his experiments with colour and atmosphere, but his paintings and watercolours increasingly move beyond direct observation. Rather than describing a particular place, Iskowitz uses the landscape as a point of departure, allowing its forms to become progressively absorbed into the structure of the image.
The early Parry Sound watercolours are distinguished by their unusually dark, atmospheric palettes. Deep blues, greens, violets, browns, and near-black passages accumulate across the paper, creating a sense of density from which fragments of landscape seem to emerge -- despite the fluidity of his medium. Trees, rocks, shoreline, and water remain perceptible, but they are never fully resolved; instead, they flicker in and out of recognition as washes of pigment bleed, overlap, and dissolve into one another.
The fluidity of watercolour allows Iskowitz to achieve a remarkable range of tonal effects, from transparent washes and delicate passages of light to concentrated areas of saturated colour. Space is consequently created less through conventional perspective than through the shifting relationships between dark and light, density and transparency, gesture and stillness.
This tension between the observed landscape and its gradual transformation is central to the Parry Sound series. Iskowitz does not abandon nature so much as discover abstraction within it. His marks suggest the movement of foliage, the irregularity of rock, the reflection of light on water, or the recession of a distant horizon, while simultaneously functioning as independent gestures within the composition.
These works therefore occupy an important position between his earlier representational paintings and the increasingly chromatic abstraction that would emerge during the 1960s. They reveal an artist using the landscape not simply to record the Canadian environment, but to explore the expressive possibilities of colour, atmosphere, and the medium itself.
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Untitled (Parry Sound Series)
Canada, 1960
Watercolour on paper
Signed and dated by artist in pencil, lower left
15"H 21.5"W (work)
22"H 28.5"W (framed)
Very good condition
Newly framed with museum glass
Provenance: The Gershon Iskowitz Foudation (GIF C276)
Note: price is $4,950 CAD
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