The Owl and the Butterfly

An intimately candid memoir about the ambitions, struggles, and achievements of one of Canada's most prolific and important modernist artists.

The Owl and The Butterfly is the memoir West Coast modernist Jack Shadbolt (1909-1998) never quite got around to writing. Using poems and excerpts from his personal journals, letters, talks, and writings, Vancouver-based critic Susan Mertens has created a compelling collage of the artist, a bildungsroman of an extraordinarily driven and divided personality navigating the rapidly changing social and artistic challenges of the 20th century.

Inspired initially by Emily Carr, Shadbolt put the West Coast's dramatic landscapes and elements of both Indigenous and Western culture through lenses of abstraction, cubism, and surrealism. The result was a highly original form of Modernism, outward looking in its international influences yet absolutely of this place, as comfortable at the Venice Biennale as in solo shows at Canada's major public galleries.

Through writing as colorful as his giant butterflies, as psychologically insightful as his bird poems, The Owl and the Butterfly reveals the ego and insecurity that plagued Shadbolt, a tightly wound combination that condemned him to a teeter-totter of near-manic productive highs and soul-deadening lows when he feared he would never again paint. It is the very human story of how the immigrant son of a sign painter worked tirelessly to turn "the sow's ear of me ... into the silk purse of an artist" so that, one day, a viewer might be stopped in their tracks when, in his words, "the poetry breaks through" and a mute but magical act of communication occurs.

Featuring black-and-white photographs and sixteen pages of full-color selections of his paintings, this is the story of an artist obsessed from his late teens to his death bed with the question of how he might make great art, an artist who, at heart, wanted what we all desire-to belong and to be understood.