By Terence Roberts

Because light, sunlight (which assists growth in nature, and remains in the colours of the sky, flowers, leaves, water etc.) is a major element in planet earth’s life, it became a central value within the work of leading modern painters in the early 20th century.

Matisse spent a lot of his time in Nice on the French Riviera, Morocco, the South Seas, even Martinique and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean. His canvasses shocked with their areas of blank unpainted space, their raw, direct, un-academic application of colour, shape, and line.

His huge colorful “cut-out” collages did the same, and a tropical element reigned, as in his large abstract masterpiece collages Memories of Oceania.

Raoul Dufy, born on the French Riviera, was the same. Dufy’s amazing, swift, childish looking, but highly skilful paintings of beaches, ships, waves, birds, horses, people, flowers, musical instruments, nudes from the Caribbean and India as well, are definitely affected by warm tropical everyday sensations of pleasure on earth.

It is not a touristic happiness provided by a travel agency’s holiday in the sun, but the preservation of an earthly gift put on and paper and canvas for contemplation. Whereas meticulous realistic paintings and drawings with definite outlines, careful paint application, etc, became more suited or successful as illustration or commercial advertisements, the full creative effect of tropical light on the other hand, included glare which erased areas of sight, revealing the nature of reality as an expanded synthesis of light, colour, shape, and movement in space.

This was not what came to be known as Impressionism in painting, however.

Miro, for example, from Barcelona and the sun struck Mediterranean island of Majorca, became the second outstanding hard-working modern Spanish painter after Picasso. He made his famous breakthrough (which elevated him from being a poor homeless refugee) painting in a white-washed foul coop which was his first humble home in Paris.

They were a startling series of gouaches subtly connected to the ingenious non-Western rock art of North and South America called petroglyphs. Such art was left for centuries in the dusty stark hot wild terrain of the continents.

But Miro’s modern paintings are not copies of these petroglyphs; if they were they would have little new value derived from what the Native Indians had already done; rather the significance of these original indigenous signs of artistry referring to animals, planets, plants, hallucigenic visions, and the galaxy, became an influence on Miro’s extended style of black lines bearing colourful indefinite shapes and spots like dust.

The stark white backgrounds of most of Miro’s works preserve not only tropical brightness, but carry the unfinished evolving identity of his paintings into a productive contingency, which is the antithesis of pre-determined control.

There is the famous story of a sensitive buyer who visited Miro’s sun-filled Majorca studio, and, while they were drinking coffee, contemplated one large interesting spot of brown on bare white canvas which excited him in the overall painting; he asked Miro how he had found such a fascinating brown, and Miro said one morning he was drinking coffee looking down at the work when his hand shook, spilling coffee on his canvas, and he left it there because it was a perfect act of painting. The painting sold instantly for an enormous sum to the art lover.

Leading examples of modern European painters, like Klee, Picasso, Dufy, Miro, with Mediterranean and tropical influences on their works, inspired emerging North American abstract painters to discover and cherish tropical cultural qualities within their own continent.

The Americans did not have to look further than their vast continent, where certain States reflected their original Indigenous artefacts and customs. Pollock, Newman, Clifford Still, Rothko, Gottlieb, Pousette-Dart helped American abstract painting climb to world fame after World War 2, and were all influenced by the dust drawings, petroglyphs, buckskin designs, feathers, blankets, pottery, and cosmic ecological concepts of American indigenous culture, with its large dose of sun-struck fertility.

Richard Diebenkorn created an entire unique oeuvre of stunning architectural abstract paintings with his California coast Ocean View works.

De Kooning, a runaway from Holland to New York, never gave up the sensual fleshy influence of Rubens and Jordaens.

His baroque brushstrokes are loaded with creative light picked up from naked flesh, mud, flowers, surf, sand, grass, all penetrated by sunlight.

Helen Frankenthaler surged above most female abstract painters because of her ability to make paintings combining femininity with an inner light from the senses, where sensitive feeling becomes an outer landscape of flowing colours: pink, lilac, carmine, orange, blue, evoking corporeal stains, soap suds, garments, flowers, even blood; her elongated blowing shapes are insubstantial like a whiff of perfume. It is a subtle balancing act where small intimate things are blown up and seep with tropical values from inside nature: seashells, the beach, ocean, clouds, mountains, the sky; in short, the elements find their influence as natural color and light.

In Canada, a handful of important modernist painters emerged under the awareness that the very Northern frigid environment produced a desire for the opposite tropical warmth in art.

Canadian cities began to be crowded with immigrants bringing hot influential cuisine and ‘exotic’ music from the East, South America, the Caribbean, Africa, etc.

In Toronto, Jack Bush painted some of the most vibrant Canadian paintings ever, under influences which juxtaposed bright and subdued colours in amazing clear rhythmic bands and spots, inspired by things as simple as a ripe strawberry, chopsticks, Indigenous totems, Swing jazz, etc.

Gordon Rayner journeyed to the Amazon which inspired large abstract paintings bursting with lush tropical colors and shapes. But it was David Bolduc who in Toronto quietly became one of the most unique cosmopolitan Canadian/North American abstract painters. Bolduc’s stunning enigmatic canvases are centered by ambiguous designs made by drawing with paint squeezed straight from the tube.

These bright designs are surrounded by backgrounds of fairly monochromatic activity evoking the tropical jungle, buckskin, ‘exotic’ fabrics, even ‘primitive’ tribal body painting, etc. It is their shocking juxtaposition of opposites which mesmerizes the viewer. Bolduc, whose serious ambition was to continue where Picasso, Matisse, Klee and Malevich left off, succeeded brilliantly, no doubt inspired also by his yearly sojourns in far off tropical places like Morocco, Casablanca, Spain, Portugal, Afghanistan, India, China, Central & South America.

However, it is Canada’s greatest and most renowned modern painter, Jean-Paul Riopelle, who fled provincial Quebec for New York then Paris at the beginning of the 1950s, and rose to become a legendary and flamboyant painter of super-human breath-taking accomplishment. Riopelle’s paintings stand alone in bringing to staggering fulfilment the deep cosmic and fertile energy produced by natural light. He mastered the palette knife and trowel to produce a concentrated kaleidoscope of colour, line, and shape rooted in the full spectrum of an Indigenous culture he was racially part of. It is his relationship to such a primal culture of the Americas which his painterly light associated with the tropics. But Riopelle never emphasized his indigenous blood much; obviously, since he wanted to be judged by his work, since painters are not good or famous because of their ethnicity or cultural ancestry, but on how good they paint.