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Former Shadbolt Fellow publishes book on life of Jack Shadbolt
Former Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow in the Humanities Susan Mertens is launching her new book on the life of prolific artist and fellowship program namesake, Jack Shadbolt.
Published by Figure 1 Publishing, the book, Jack Shadbolt: In His Words, features an edited collection of Shadbolt's poems, letters, and journals that accompany Merten's portrayal of one of Canada's most famous modernist artists. Merten's research and writing of the book were facilitated by her Shadbolt Fellowship residency at Simon Fraser University in 2019-2020, during which she was hosted by the Graduate Liberal Studies program.
Description from the publisher:
An intimately candid memoir about the ambitions, struggles, and achievements of one of Canada's most prolific and important modernist artists.
Jack Leonard Shadbolt (1909-1998) was one of Canada's most prolific modernist artists, deeply influenced both by the West Coast landscapes and cultures that surrounded him and by the wider international currents in artmaking. Throughout his life, he remained singularly fixated on the question of how to make great art, bringing articulate and piercing analysis to a life-long search for meaning through his ceaseless acts of art.
He also yearned - as we all do - to belong and to be understood. Using excerpts from his sometimes startlingly self-confessional journals, letters, talks, and writings, as well as his poetry, arts critic Susan Mertens - who enjoyed a twenty-five-year friendship with Shadbolt - crafts an intimate and candid collage of an extraordinarily driven and divided personality navigating the rapidly changing social and artistic challenges of the 20th century.
This is the memoir Shadbolt never quite got around to writing.
Images from the publisher:
