48/150: Ann MacIntosh Duff

Ann MacIntosh Duff (1925 – 2022) is about to be the focus of a retrospective at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, which has acquired 200 of Duff’s watercolor works painted during the course of 70 years. Her most expressive works are painted from her cottage at Point au Baril on Georgian Bay, which record the atmospheric weather on the shore: misty mornings, blazing hot afternoons, and clear midnight skies. 

NOTE: The McMichael retrospective took place in 2023-24 – see the exhibition link here.

Duff’s paintings often included objects with symbolic and universal meanings, such as binoculars, cameras and telescopes to allude to ways of seeing the world. She painted her landscapes and still lifes primarily from memory rather than observation

When you make a watercolour, it’s sort of like a dance between the wet paper and the paintbrush in your hand. You have to be very strong to do it. You have to run from one end of the room to the other, run back, take a look at what you’ve done and decide what you have to do. You have to leave what you have on the wet paper – which is doing things on its own – see how it’s carrying and run back again to stop it.

– Ann MacIntosh Duff

Duff’s style has been compared to David Milne (with whom she has exhibited), Peter Doig, and Annie Pootoogook. The heavy, carefully considered line of Milne’s coloured engravings can be seen in the bow of the boat in “Navigator.” (Above). Peter Doig’s patches of saturated colour might be gleaned from the few strokes composing dark trees in “Northern Evening”; and Duff’s still life compositions with strong outlines and solid planes of colour with emphasis on specific objects in “Red Hot Jazz” (Below) produce similar effects to Pootoogook’s coloured pencil drawings. (Info in this paragraph from an article in Art Toronto, here)

Born in Toronto in 1925, MacIntosh Duff became a member of the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour in 1952 where she remained an active member for 30 years. In 1959, she began working with Douglas Duncan at the Picture Loan Society, one of the most influential galleries in Canada at the time which also showed works by David Milne, Harold Town, Bertram Brooker and Paul-Émile Borduas. She exhibited there until Duncan’s death in 1968. Her most recent exhibition was in 2022 at Nicholas Metivier Gallery which represented her for many years.

Ann MacIntosh Duff died at the age of 98 in December, 2022 (obituary here)

The McMichael exhibition opens July 3 and runs through March, 2024, more here.

Image at the top of this post: Jessie’s Flowers, 1972, watercolour on paper, 22 x 30 in

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This is No. 48 in the series 150 Artists, an ongoing series on artists you should know.