Walter Yarwood

YARWOOD, Walter Hawley

Born: 19 September 1917, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Died: 22 December 1996, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

Painter and sculptor and founding member of Painters Eleven, Walter Yarwood was born in Toronto; his father was a tailor and his mother, a dressmaker. He studied commercial art at the Western Technical School with Herbert C. Clark and L.A.C. Panton, and won numerous awards from the Toronto Art Director’s Club. Yarwood regarded himself self-taught as a painter; early canvases such as Guitar Player, 1945, have a social realist tone.  In the late 1940s, Yarwood became friendly with artists Harold Town and Oscar Cahén, who were also working as commercial artists. By the early 1950s, Yarwood began to paint abstractly and was soon invited by Town, Cahén, and others to join the first Painters Eleven exhibition held at the Roberts Gallery, Toronto, 1954. In paintings of the mid to late 1950s, such as Yellow Totem, 1957-1959, and Forest, 1959, Yarwood favoured compositions with strong graphic forms, large central elements and vivid palettes.

Although Yarwood’s paintings were well appreciated by his peers, critical and public response to his work was less favourable. Disheartened by the critical reception of his first solo painting exhibition at the Here and Now Gallery in Toronto in 1959, coupled with the disbanding of Painters Eleven in 1960, Yarwood decided to abandon painting and turn to sculpture. Attracted to the more methodical processes of sculpture, Yarwood reflected on his past as a painter and commented in 1964: I feel they were paintings about sculptural ideas.

Reviewing his first solo sculpture exhibition at the Jerrold Morris International Gallery in 1962, the critic at the Toronto Telegram observed, Yarwood has always been witty and original in his pictorial concepts and the elegant linear black steel sculpture, Garden of Weeds and the capricious open design of Game are rich evidence of it. In his 1965 exhibition at the same gallery, Yarwood abandoned the bronze, iron casting, and welded steel of his previous work, and explored surface treatments on rough aluminium castings using acid and power tools. Writing of works such as Tower, 1965, in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, the Globe and Mail reviewer praised their solidity and fluidity and described his process: he piles solid slabs of aluminium into a tower, then bores delicate holes into them.

In the 1960s, Yarwood also received many prestigious commissions. Early in the decade bronze sculptures such as Cedars, 1962, commissioned by the University of Toronto presented the large abstract shapes of his paintings now liberated from the two-dimensional flatness of the canvas. Other notable works included the nine metre high totemic sculpture for the Winnipeg International Airport; Horizon, 1964; a bronze sculptural relief for the façade of Sidney Smith Hall, University of Toronto; and The Pines, 1968, a monumental bronze abstraction of trees commissioned by the Government of Ontario and installed at the MacDonald Block, Queen’s Park, Toronto.

In the mid-1970s, Yarwood taught for a few years at Humber College, Toronto, and then moved with his wife to the small Lake Erie community of Port Rowan. In the early 1990s, Yarwood returned to painting landscapes in watercolour, oil, and gouache. In addition, Yarwood was a sailor, a woodworker and designer of furniture.

Anne Newlands
Compiled June 2008

A Dictionary of Canadian Artists, volumes 1-8 by Colin S. MacDonald, and volume 9 (online only), by Anne Newlands and Judith Parker
National Gallery of Canada / Musée des beaux-arts du Canada