Still Life of Fruit and Flowers, 1958 (circa)

Goodridge Roberts was one of Canada’s most versatile artists, equally brilliant in his depiction of the still life as he was in the landscape as he was with the figures and, including the nude. He was not a painter of the winter landscape. In the colder months he resolved important compositions with objects in his home and studio.

In Norman McLaren’s On the Creative Process, he explains how an artist like Roberts could juxtapose sometimes the same objects and achieve different but aesthetically equally outstanding works of art.

“As a painter, one of your training is to see a thing as an abstract thing. When you look at a group of objects, it’s not just this object and that object, it’s also the relationship between the two, the shading, etc. You analyze it, it’s no longer a crucifix or a plant leaf. It’s a green shape with a curve and a darkening on one side. I think the painter automatically sees a scene as an abstraction — even in the process of doing a painting that is completely realistic.

In art, you want to stress some things which you feel are important. If you eliminate the things that aren’t important you arrive at the things you want to say very quickly.” (Norman McLaren, On the Creative Process, ed. by Donald McWilliams (Montreal: National Film Board of Canada, 1991), 43.)