b'Paterson Ewen: Day Moon Paterson Ewen was one of Canadas innovative landscape painters. Dubbed the prospector by colleagues in Montreal, Ewens career spanned from the 1950s in Montreal and his association with the Automatists, to the close-knit regionalism of the London, Ontario artists in the 1970s. While Ewens practice did not necessarily align with either movement, both would have an impact on his art practice.Although he attended the School of Art and Design at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts under the tutelage of Arthur Lismer and Goodridge Roberts, Ewen was largely a self-taught artist. His early work in Montreal began with figuration before shifting to abstraction until 1971 when Ewen turned to the landscape, albeit not in a traditional manner. Ewens Phenomenascapes break from traditional landscape painting in two ways. Firstly, many works, such as Rocks Moving in The Current of a Stream (1971) used old scientific textbooks as the basis for the composition. Secondly, while this work may still be considered a painting, along with Thunderchain (1971), Ewen would use materials found at hardware stores instead of paint to depict the particular phenomena: linoleum would be used to form rocks in a riverbed, a chain would be used to implicate the sound of thunder. It was this openness to the possibility inherent in the materials he used that lend Ewens landscapes their distinctiveness, and it was the method of working with materials to make an image that would form the basis of works on plywood that would span the rest of his career.While these previous works were diagrammatic of the landscape, Ewen would begin creating works that referenced the landscape. These works do come from direct experience, as Ewen notes: I call my work Phenomenascapes because they are images of what is happening around us as individuals, rain, lightning, hail, wind. They are also images of what is happening in and around our Universe, Galaxies, Solar Eruptions. They are sometimes inner phenomena. I observe, contemplate, and then attack. [italics added] (Chinook, 1:3, Spring 1979, a publication of Weather Enterprises)Ewens first plywood work, Solar Eclipse (1971) began first as an idea for a woodblock print, but upon painting the surface of the plywood, he found that he need not go further: an image had been made. Using an electrical router, Ewen would gouge the plywood at varying depths to create an image upon which he would later paint, or add pieces of aluminum, coco matting or nails. Since 1971, celestial objectsbut especially moonsbecame prominent in Ewens practice. Day Moon was created in the summer of 1987 for a solo exhibition at Carmen Lamanna Gallery. Despite personal problems, artistically this was a prolific time for Ewen. In 1988 he would have a retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario, where this work was included in the exhibition catalogue.'