Alberta IV: Winter Morning 1961

Painted following her return to Calgary from New York and Europe, Alberta IV: Winter Morning was one of Marion Nicoll’s earliest responses to the Alberta landscape in her new abstract vocabulary. Despite the observable world being her point of departure, her new works were not the naturalistic landscapes she had once painted. Her title informs us of her moment of inspiration: a cold winter day with early morning sunlight offering fleeting warmth. This complex and daring interplay of primary and secondary colours (red, blue, and yellow versus green, orange, and purple) balances warm and cool effects while also achieving overall flatness throughout.

Nicoll’s choices were carefully thought out. She was exceedingly practiced and well read in colour theory, including the potential symbolic and emotional effects of colour. Her knowledge had been shaped by modern theories, from the psychological workings of colour espoused by Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) to the analyses of value, hue, and chroma endorsed by Albert H. Munsell (1858–1918). Nicoll explained, “yellow is the most easily seen colour, Red is next, blue is hazy… yellow commands attention, red signals… Red and yellow focus within the eye… blue focusses outside the eye which makes it appear fuzzy in outline.”

Remembering too her learnings from instructor Alfred Crocker Leighton (1900–1965), she recalled: “We had to get every degree of light/dark, warm/cold that was there, not matching the colour but matching the warmth or coldness and the light or dark… I know the tone of every colour I look at and I use that in abstract painting.” Nicoll perhaps also remembered Leighton’s call for a distinct vocabulary for painting Alberta, having advised her that “this country won’t be painted by me…trained as an Englishman…it’s going to be painted by someone who is born here.”

Alberta IV: Winter Morning is one of the largest and most striking works in the Alberta Series. Begun in 1960, this series was the largest project she developed, comprised as it was of fourteen canvases. To understand the place of Alberta IV: Winter Morning in the entire grouping remains a challenge since not one painting is held in a public collection, some are not possible to locate, and photographic images of them are not consistently available. Additionally, over the years, titles have also been confused and this painting is no exception. It has been identified with at least three different titles since it was first brought to public attention, errors that were doubtfully the artist’s.

This canvas passed into private hands after Nicoll’s 1975 retrospective and was afterwards made available for loan in her subsequent key exhibitions, most recently her 2013 retrospective. Nicoll’s painting journal, in which she documents the contents of the Alberta Series, offers much insight into the cohesion she gave to the project. Her subtitles indicate the topography, vegetation, climate, times of day, and changing seasons that inspired the series. It was Nicoll’s homecoming after a vital experience in New York and Europe.