Mixed media on board

28.25×16 in.

Provenance

Mira Godard Gallery, Toronto

Private collection, Toronto

 Dorval Airport

“This is Montreal Airport, a picture that is the counter part of Plane Watchers at Malton which I did for the Toronto Series, illustrated in Kurelek’s Vision of Canada by Joan Murray. This is my most familiar view of Dorval Airport, the one I see when entering or leaving Montreal for Toronto. On this occasion I was pulling into Montreal on a grey cloudy afternoon for my first summer research trip there. I pulled over to the shoulder and did the preliminary sketch on the panel itself and finished it off with the aid of black and white photographs later. Incidentally, there is no significance to the beam of light. It was there and came in handy compositionally.”

William Kurelek 

Most of the paintings of this period have a common viewing point. One is standing and viewing from a normal height. One sees foreground, middle ground, and distance. Part of Kurelek’s ability, his force, is that he frames his paintings so that we seem to be in a camera. The viewer’s eye is like a film, and Kurelek has set the scene before us, put in that average, unremarkable middle range lens nearest to the human eye and snapped. The picture strikes all at once, in colour, full frame, in focus all over, and we register content, helplessly, film in a box. The action viewed realistically, in the stop frame technique, gain additional force, the cars speeding by, airplanes overhead and the sunlight shinning through the clouds, at a photographed moment in passing time.

Adapted from O Toronto, William Kurelek, General Mills Press, 1973