Red Initiation [Initiation rouge]

While working as the Director of the School of Art at the University of Saskatchewan in Regina, painter Ken Lochhead initiated the important Emma Lake Workshops in 1955, to which renowned figures from the American Abstract Expressionists movement came to teach. He was also a member of the Regina Five, an important group of avant-garde abstract artists who exhibited at the National Gallery of Canada in 1961. Though he had largely turned to more referential subject matter in his work by the 1970s, this work, part of his spray painting series, speaks to his earlier decades of working in abstraction. Lochhead was born in Ottawa, and returned here to stay in 1975 when he took up a teaching position at the University of Ottawa.