Pink Mask

This pastel by Miller Gore Brittain is signed and dated 1962. The label from Celia Toomik, Brittain's friend and executor is present on the back of the work.

It is presented in what appears to be the original frame. The framed dimensions are 31.75 x 23.25 in. The work itself is in very good condition with no signs of foxing. It was taken out of its frame and is not mounted to the backing.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY -

Brittain’s artistic life has been categorized into his social realism period, his war art, his post war Biblical themes (painting as he described it as “the soul of man”), his short-lived rapturous, private family/fatherhood private moments, the haunted and tormented figures following the death of his wife and then a consistent refinement by the mid 60’s. Others simply divide Brittain’s work into two segments – the elegantly done factual works of art and on the other side the many works containing the artist’s personal symbolism, with highly synthesized human figures, quite light and airy and often highly emotional.

While in London during the Second World War, Brittain visited collections of William Blake’s work and found a kindred spirit in the poet, artist, and visionary. Brittain’s subsequent works represent a religious zeal. Unlike Blake, Brittain was no mystic. He did not paint visions. His inventive imagery actually came with the act of painting and drawing, revealing an inspired and sophisticated mind. A personal mythology built around male and female figures followed this period, which paved the way for his concentration of the head, example the pastel “Pink Mask” (1962). During this period, Brittain’s focus was on the object as symbol and its presentation was decidedly surrealistic, distorted at first glance in size and shape, but highlighted the artist’s intention to focus on colour, form and what he considered to be most important - the soul, what lay underneath the skin’s surface.

One of the many reviews about his work subsequent to his death described the change in attitude by old friends of Brittain’s including dealers in Montreal and Toronto with the introduction of his post war Biblical themed paintings. They had expected Brittain to expand on his successful realism and were “embarrassed or indifferent to the new turn of his work”. This most original of Canadian artists who had been the darling of Toronto critics fell into relative obscurity when the art world of the late 40’s and 50’s found his preoccupation with Biblical themes inexplicable and unfashionable.

During the opening of Miller Brittain’s Retrospective Exhibition at the New Brunswick Museum in Saint John in 1981, the artist’s good friend and concert pianist, Margaret Ann Ireland introductory remarks included:

It’s ironic that Miller Brittain did not gain the wide recognition that should have been his, during his lifetime. If he had found a greater response to his work, and a larger perception of his art, would that have saved him from his dark periods of despair? We do know that he was very brave. He had the courage to look life full in the face; and through his art he searched both the heights and the depths, of his own experience. If we remember that, we can never look with sightless eyes upon his paintings.

Some people have called Miller Brittain a tragic figure. I prefer to remember him as a happy man. I’ve watched him at work, brush in hand, intensely absorbed. I recall his sheer joy and exhilaration on the day he finished a major canvas. (How many of us ever know such moments of fulfilment?)

The National Film Board’s documentary film on the life of Miller Brittain, important retrospective exhibitions, coffee table books and time as the great equalizer have provided the historical perspective to remember Miller Brittain as the artistic genius that he truly was in all his various periods. He sought truth without compromise and without the least concern of what the world judged or thought. As one reviewer stated, “He left the standard against which others must measure their work”

In his own words, "My Aim as an Artist", Brittain admitted that people interested him most.

“I don’t figure it all out beforehand,” he once said. “I put down colour and form and change them until it looks right”.

“I had been thinking more and more about what went on inside the people I had been making pictures of, and why they did the things they did. I began to concern myself with what I imagined they felt and why they reacted in certain ways to the things that happened to them. So while I was still interested in their outward appearance, I was perhaps even more concerned with their psychological make up. "

“This led me to ponder on the problems of good and evil. I contemplated the inner conflict that is part of everyman and tried to incorporate into my work such abstract qualities as love, despair, terror and so on, since they are the inevitable experience of everyman."

“I am trying to make line, mass and colour function psychologically. I desire that they intensify the expression of the character of the things involved. The important thing about the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland was the grin. In my pictures I wish to pay more attention to the grin and less to the cat.”