2018-2020 I started these colour works by spontaneously drawing out horizontal and vertical lines in thin willow charcoal on bright white grounds. I could then erase and redraw the lines up or down, to the left or right, adding or subtracting until a free-flowing feeling was attained. I painted each shape in multiple layers, adjusting tone, contrast, saturation and hue using thin coats of oil colour. For me it expressed an inner vibration, as if I were an instrument playing out a natural rhythm.
Night Cities, oil on canvas paintings, 2005-2007
Colour Sensations, oil on linen paintings, 2018-2019
Mira Godard Gallery, Toronto ON
November 14 - December 12, 2015
Exhibition text by Terence Corcoran (Columnist and Editor, The Financial Post)
In 1896, the studio of the great photographer William Notman orchestrated a panoramic sweep of Montreal from atop the Montreal Street Railway Company’s smoke stack. The population of the city had just soared 50% to 300,000 over 15 years. But that was nothing compared with what was to come. As more immigrants landed from Ireland, England and Europe, the population jumped to 500,000 by 1910 and to near 1,000,000 by 1930, an immigration story worthy of headlines today.
The images in the panorama capture overviews of a city in the midst of dramatic transition. And now, thanks to artist Joseph Siddiqi, we have imaginative, dramatic "larger than life" versions of some of those original photographs.
Nobody is more thrilled than I am. More than a decade ago I purchased prints of the Notman panorama from the McCord Museum. All nine photographs—which sweep the horizon from Mount Royal to the St. Lawrence River, the Lachine Canal and views east and west—have since lined a wall of my downtown Toronto condo. Then, a couple of years ago at the Mira Godard booth at the Toronto Art Fair I came across "Montreal 1896," Joseph's large and beautiful painting of one of the nine Notman panorama scenes. I knew I had to have this artist, whom I had never met, do another.
The result is Joseph’s creative interpretation of a second Notman print: "Mount Royal 1896."
The Notman photographs are fine art works in themselves, so beautiful in their precise, almost high-definition images of the new growing industrial city—from the churches and factories and shipping sites to the crisp white sheets hanging on clothes lines in residential areas. I almost feel I should be able to climb down from the photographer’s vantage point and walk over to key intersections. Certainly I wish I could, if only for a day.
Having Joseph Siddiqi’s version of the Mount Royal perspective makes walking the streets so much easier—and more interesting. Joseph's "Mount Royal 1896" is not a reproduction. Like his other paintings of the panorama, it is filled with creative additions (and omissions), many of which I have probably not yet noticed. But there is one Siddiqi feature that stands out: The moon! It is an impossible moon, astronomically. It sits to the north over Mount Royal, just between the cleavage of Mount Royal and Westmount.
Through his command of black and white—and all the complex tints and shadings between—Joseph Siddiqi has created an absorbing work. I love standing before it, my eye starting with the white sheets on the clotheslines of the foreground residential area and then moving up and away through the streets of what was to become downtown, up to the mountain, then down over the roof of Windsor Station past the rail terminal canopies and then back to the white sheets that, for all I know, could have belonged to my grandmother.