The Surprising Range of Sylvia Tait

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Sylvia Tait, “Florescence,” 2017

acrylic on paper, 41" x 30" (collection of the artist, photo by Blaine Campbell)

Sylvia Tait, a senior West Coast modernist linked to the Group of Seven’s Arthur Lismer from her student days, is having a major survey at the Burnaby Art Gallery. On the heels of her recent painting show at Vancouver’s Bau-Xi Gallery, it presents a surprisingly multidisciplinary artist.

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Sylvia Tait, “Dualities,” 2017

acrylic on paper, 41” x 30” (collection of the artist, photo by Blaine Campbell)

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Sylvia Tait, “Dialogue II (Blocks and Breakups),” 2017

acrylic on paper, 40” x 26” (collection of the artist, photo by Blaine Campbell)

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Tait is known for her colourful palette and intricately patterned abstract paintings. What we learn from the Burnaby exhibition, on view until Jan. 7, is the variety of other media she has explored, particularly drawing and printmaking, but also illustration, design and sculpture.

Tait grew up in Montreal and studied piano as a child, but her passion was painting and drawing. She enrolled at the School of Art and Design at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts when Lismer taught there. Other instructors were Marian Scott, Gordon Webber and Eldon Grier, who had worked as an assistant to Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Fellow students included Claude Tousignant and Guido Molinari. Tait graduated in 1953 at the top of her class. Her drawings from this period reveal a loose, lyrical style.

After her studies, she married Grier and began a life of travel: Spain and other European countries; Mexico, where she and Grier owned a house in San Miguel de Allende; and, of course, Canada and the United States.

In the 1960s, she bought a printing press with her friend, Betty Goodwin, who would become one of Canada’s leading printmakers, and produced many prints.

Tait’s stylized drawings had a modernist sensibility, and by the mid-1960s she had moved fully to abstraction. In the exhibition catalogue, co-curator Robin Laurence describes this new work as a “suggestion of biomorphic surrealism married to abstract expressionism, energetic and sometimes unsettling.”

An untitled 1964 acrylic on paper is an early example of the mixture of organic forms with more geometric blocking – squares of colour painted next to each other that Tait refers to as “ladders.” These blocking devices appear in many of her paintings to this day.

Tait moved with her family to the West Coast in 1968, settling first near Horseshoe Bay, and later in North Vancouver. She became involved with local avant-garde arts communities and made a series of posters for Vancouver New Music. Her interest in music is apparent in many of her paintings, which are often titled with musical names.

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Sylvia Tait in her studio. Photo by Blaine Campbell.

Tait is a hard-working artist, with well over 100 exhibitions to her credit. Her work is in the collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, the Canada Council Art Bank and elsewhere. This survey is long overdue.