James Gordaneer, Abstraction of Baldwin Street, 1959, pencil on paper.

James Gordaneer has been drawing and/or painting pretty much every day since approximately 1950. His formal education was brief, but it included influential Canadian mid-twentieth-century artists: Jock MacDonald, Carl Schaefer and Yvonne McKague Housser. This history situates Gordaneer among the first generation of Toronto artists to follow the Painters Eleven, a group of Toronto painters who introduced New York abstract expressionism to English Canada in the 1950s. However, unlike most of his colleagues during those years, Gordaneer never entirely rejected representation for the sake of pure abstraction. This polarity in Gordaneer's work is one of several that an in-depth discussion of his art, philosophy and career would reveal. The focus of this review of his recent retrospective at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria is his drawing practice.

Gordaneer has always balanced his interest in abstraction with more representational sketches or studies of the subject. However, these sketches are not the usual preliminary studies toward a more abstract interpretation. For Gordaneer, these divergent manners of perception have equal value. He has always relished the balancing dance between them. His art is as much about ways of seeing and ways of manipulating surface marks as it is about his many subjects; wrestlers, circus people, train engines, his neighbours' homes, landscapes, and psychological portraits and figures.

James Gordaneer, Baldwin Street, 1959, pencil on paper.

Two late 1950's graphite pencil drawings of a house in Toronto's Baldwin Street Village clarify this analysis. The representational sketch exemplifies Gordaneer's debt to the late-romantic paintings of the Group of Seven. The crisp shadow edges, the messy hatching and the free-floating contour line pay homage to the graphic and design sensibility that The Group brought to their craft. On the other hand, Gordaneer's abstract interpretation is a nod toward the modernist theories of push-pull, anxious line and dissolving forms and planes that Painters Eleven were re-inventing the Toronto art scene in the 1950s.

It makes little difference whether Gordaneer works in black-and-white graphic media or colour or whether he works from photographs or the television screen or directly from the subject. His colours rarely match what he observes, and while his colours have a life of their own, they are always subordinate to edge and line. The pen and waterolour drawing, "Roller Derby," produced in 1971, is as fast as an image flickering on a television screen. His line searches for the presence of the subject as much as it searches for the dissolution of the subject into pattern. While the drawing struggles with the subject, the accompanying colour seems a kind of slow and balancing daydream.

Painted in 2005, "Gumshoe," a painting that is more a drawing - despite being oil on canvas - confirms that Gordaneer thinks like a drawer, or draftsman, rather than a painter. Interestingly, the work loosely resembles many of Picasso's studies of masks for his "Demoiselles d'Avignon," an association that Gordaneer was unconscious of until recently. Picasso too was more a draftsman than painter and, similar to Picasso, Gordaneer's colours are an intuitive system within the armature of the drawing. Along with the wandering black lines and the energetic hatching, the colours are almost more suggestive of landscape than portraiture.

James Gordaneer, Roller Derby, 1971, pen and ink and watercolour on paper, 30.5 x 22.5 cm.

In order to avoid explicit representation, Gordaneer constantly reworks the canvas with a wandering brush or graphite line that shifts the subject toward another one of his themes. A landscape might slowly evolve into a figure. A portrait might take on the attributes of landscape. This constant self-critical re-drawing as simultaneously research and expression results in paintings that are both representational and abstract, and this duality is symbolic of the nature of materiality and personal existence that physicists, as well as contemporary artists are often concerned with.