• REPRESENTING THE ESTATE OF

    RAY MEAD

  • Ray Mead was a prominent Canadian abstractionist and a founding member of the Painters Eleven. His technical mastery and creative...
    Ray Mead. © The Estate of Ray Mead.

    Ray Mead was a prominent Canadian abstractionist and a founding member of the Painters Eleven. His technical mastery and creative vision were the result of a decades-long art practice. 

     

    Born in England in 1921, Mead grew up drawing on the blue paper his grandmother would bring home from the local store where it was used to wrap sugar and raisins. Mead's grandmother was one of the earliest supporters of his artistic development. She had artwork on the walls of her home and took Mead to museums such as the Tate, the National Gallery, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Mead went on to pursue a degree in Fine Arts at the Slade School of Art in London. There, he was introduced to the art of prominent British artists working at the time, such as Henry Moore. 

     

    Following his graduation, Mead joined the Royal Air Force, travelling between Canada and the United States to train American bomber pilots during WWII. In 1941, an injury caused Mead to be restationed to Mount Hope Airfield Base in Hamilton, Ontario, where he would continue to live after the war. It was in Hamilton that he befriended Hortense Gordon, a painter and former student of Hans Hoffman. Mead would later credit Gordon as having taught him “more than any art school.” The two artists would later become members of a group called Painters Eleven. 

  • Following World War II, the art capital of the Western world shifted from Paris to New York where a group...
    Painters Eleven at the Park Gallery, c. 1957. Photographed by Peter Croydon, 1957.

    Following World War II, the art capital of the Western world shifted from Paris to New York where a group of artists began painting in a style that would become known as Abstract Expressionism. Meanwhile, new artistic vocabularies were also being developed in Montreal by the Automatistes. In Toronto, however, the Canadian landscape tradition still dominated the art scene and responses to abstraction remained tentative. 

     

    In 1953, a group of artists with a shared desire to advance Canadian art in the direction of abstraction formed the collective Painters Eleven. Mead was one of the founding members of the group. 

     

    Throughout the decade Mead regularly exhibited with the group. The artists self-curated their shows in a groundbreaking departure from established arts societies such as the Ontario Society of Artists (OSA) and the Royal Canadian Academy (RCA). Although critical response to their work initially ranged from shock to disapproval, reviews became positive over time. In 1956 the collective achieved international recognition as guest exhibitors with the American Abstract Artists organization in New York City. Critics such as Sir Herbert Read (Britain) and Clement Greenberg (United States) applauded their work. Greenberg was particularly impressed with Mead's work and considered his paintings fit for any gallery in New York. 

  • By the time the group disbanded in 1960, the Painters Eleven artists had brought abstraction to the forefront of Canadian...
    Ray Mead, Untitled, Oil on canvas, 32 x 46" in, 1952, © The Estate of Ray Mead.
    By the time the group disbanded in 1960, the Painters Eleven artists had brought abstraction to the forefront of Canadian art, cementing their places in the country's cultural history. 
     
    Mead's work continued to draw attention as he went on to exhibit at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal and the National Gallery of Canada. The artist was a true abstractionist. His affinity for spontaneous mark making and gesture is complemented by his strong eye for composition and great sensitivity to colour. The writer Christopher Hume once noted, "As loose and gestural as they may appear, Mead's works are rendered carefully, meticulously..." The art historian Joan Murray made a similar observation about Mead's works on paper, describing them as "powerful, breezy drawings, the work of someone who knows exactly what he is doing." 
     
    Today Mead's works are held in numerous collections, including those of the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario.