Harold Feist: Selection from the Permanent Collection
November 1st, 2024
Harold Feist (1945-2021) Untitled, 1980, Acrylic on paper, Collection of the Art Gallery of Algoma. Gift of Charles & Ronaye Malette and Lance Morgin
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Harold Elmer Feist was born on January 23, 1945. His father was an American Air Force pilot who worked as a flight instructor. During his early childhood, Feist lived in places like El Paso County, Texas to the Terceira Island in the Portuguese archipelago of the Azores. Feist won a scholarship to study architecture at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Though he had mathematical skills, he decided to switch programs since he had a strong interest to explore the visual arts.
Feist’s early paintings depict bars of colour radiating from a focal point or a hub. He would then experiment with mixing dish soap into his paint in order to create translucent drip patterns on the surfaces of his canvases. These series of works can also be associated with colour-field paintings that were popular between the 1950s and 70s. After finishing his bachelor’s degree in 1967, he decided to move to Baltimore to pursue his master’s at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Feist secured a job at the Alberta College of Art (now the Alberta University of the Arts) in Calgary while finishing his degree remotely. Luckily, abstract painting had already begun to flourish in the Canadian prairies. He had his first solo show at the Glenbow Museum in 1970 and was included in an important group exhibition called Prairie ’74 at The Edmonton Art Gallery. Feist would transition from grid-like structures to painting from the center of the canvas in wide bands of colour. These vibrant strokes of colour radiating outwards would be known as ‘spoke paintings’ since they resembled spokes on a wheel. After teaching in Calgary, he moved on to be an instructor at the University of Regina and Mount Allison University in New Brunswick in 1975. Three years later, he decided to fully dedicate his time to painting. With the Canada Council grant, he spent a year in New York before settling permanently in Toronto in 1979. Feist would be represented by Gallery One in Yorkville from 1980 to 2006. He continued to develop his abstract inclinations with the support of his good friend Jules Olitski and the renowned art critic, Clement Greenberg. Though Conceptual art, video art and photography were becoming more popular than abstract painting during the 1970s in Canada, Feist stayed true to his style and technique. When contributing to the catalogue of his retrospective exhibition at the Agnes Etherington Art Center at Queen's University in 1988, he wrote: I think about painting as a way of putting something good into the world. Adding to it the best I can. Nothing about 'moving' anybody or communicating, just trying to keep busy the way Nature does and maybe making a little something good before leaving. When something's at home in a work of art there's really something home there, something to be reckoned with, something concrete. You can never have enough of something ‘home.’ Presence. With the assistance of Gallery One, his paintings were bought by numerous corporate and public collections across Canada and the United States. In the age of new technology during the 1980s, he took an interest in programming and taught himself coding while working on his paintings. In fact, Feist collaborated with various tech startups to investigate the use of CD-ROMs to store art images and work on developing 3D tours. From 2018 to the end of his life, he continued to paint and exhibit at Gallery House in Toronto. Despite his failing health, he produced another show before passing away on May 7, 2021, due to a heart attack. The Art Gallery of Algoma is fortunate to have over 900 works by Harold Feist in its Permanent Collection. The pieces before you are just a sampling from this significant collection. |
