In 1959, having just returned from Europe where he drew and painted numerous harbour scenes, Jack Shadbolt started a series of night images of the Vancouver harbour as seen from the Burnaby mountains. Working spontaneously without preconceived ideas, Shadbolt achieves an abstract quality that liberates the work from the specificity of the harbour; the moored boats appear like cocoons, a motif that Shadbolt explored in earlier works. A prolific artist working in a variety of media, Shadbolt influenced generations of artists, not just in British Columbia but across the entire country.
