Book: Hand to Colour - Edited by Indra Kagis McEwen

De ma main à la couleur / Hand to Colour
Watercolours by Jean McEwen
Edited by Indra Kagis McEwen with an introduction by Laurier Lacroix.
48 pages. Black Dog Publishing, London, 2016.

De ma main à la couleur / Hand to Colour, by the Quebec artiste Jean McEwen, is a series of watercolours framed by poems written in their author’s hand. They are meant to be understood as single works whose principal conceit is that of the poet’s “hand” addressing the painter’s medium, colour. Poet and painter are, of course, one and the same, their joint presentation a passionate dual-media soliloquy on the artist’s lifelong love affair with colour and words, then nearing an end.

Each of the 16 large sheets of Arches paper that make up the series measures 56.1× 76.7 centimetres. The date appears on the cover sheet: “Completed in Montreal, 26 November 97,” McEwen wrote, specifying further that the album consists of 15 original watercolours and 29 poems “for the book hand to colour.” He died of heart failure on January 9, 1999, before being able to realize the projected book. Five years later, his widow, Indra Kagis McEwen donated the series to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, where the works were exhibited for five months in 2005. Today, almost two decades after he dated its title page, the book is at last a reality.

It is being presented as an entirely bilingual publication, with the art historian, Laurier Lacroix’s introductory essay translated into English by Judith Terry, and its English-language preface by Indra McEwen also appearing in French. The poems have been transcribed, and their French transcriptions appear along with their English renderings on the pages facing the works themselves.

Also available as a limited edition boxed set, signed and numbered with the McEwen estate stamp.