Jack Shadbolt
1909 - 1998

Shadbolt was born on Feb. 4, 1909, in Shoeburyness, England.  His father, Edmund, was a sign painter, and his mother, Alice, a dressmaker.  In 1912, the family moved to British Columbia, eventually settling in Victoria.  From an early age, Shadbolt knew he wanted to be an artist. In the late 1920s, after studying at the Victoria College and Normal School, he met Emily Carr.  "I was dumbstruck with admiration," Shadbolt later said. Carr’s renderings of Northwest Coast Indian symbols eventually led to Shadbolt’s own exploration of aboriginal images.   Exposure to the art of Emily Carr and the Group of Seven, combined with a burgeoning interest in outdoor sketching, led to his decision to become an artist.  He later studied in New York, London, and Paris, and in 1938 began teaching at the Vancouver School of Art.

In the late-1930s, he began to teach at the Vancouver School of Art and remained there for 28 years.

Shadbolt was a muscular, protean painter who was influenced by Spaniards Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró, and by British artist Graham Sutherland. Over the years, he became interested in the notion of transformation, painting clear-cut landscapes and the metamorphoses of butterflies from chrysalises. "Butterflies became a metaphor for him," observes friend and artist Alan Wood. "They expressed the fragility of life." Recalls Rogatnick: "He always had this wonderful inventiveness. I remember him taking photographs of football players, painting over them and transforming them into owls."

But despite the bold colors and lyricism in Shadbolt’s canvases, there was also a dark, apocalyptic edge. Butterflies would explode, trees would burn. "There was an incredible foreboding to some of his work," Wood says. The darkness touched a visceral chord with the public, and his work was in such demand people would line up the night before exhibitions at Vancouver’s Bau-Xi Gallery. "Once it was raining, so I invited them in and they slept on the floor," recalls co-owner, Xisa Huang. "Jack’s paintings really communicated to people."

For the next 50 years Shadbolt consolidated his position as one of Canada's most innovative and important artists.  He was an inspiration and a mentor to many, including well known Vancouver artist Tiko Kerr.

In the twelve years since his death, Jack Shadbolt's paintings have continued to rise in value.   Last year a triptych of three of his Butterfly paintings sold for over $150,000.

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