Jack Shadbolt, born on February 4, 1909, in Shoeburyness, England, is the artist that created A Given Number of Owls. He is most known for his abstract paintings, Transformations No. 5 being one of them. The piece was commissioned for the National Arts Centre in Ottawa by Hamilton Southam, founding general. Although being born in England, Shadbolt’s family moved to British Columbia, Canada in 1911. Shadbolt studied at the Arts Students’ League in New York City, London and Paris. He then later became a teacher changing schools throughout his life. During World War 2, Shadbolt was recruited to be a war artist in the Canadian Army. After the war, Shadbolt focused on painting and the arts, while founding the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Our project is an abstract, passive engagement presentation of Jack Shadbolt's A Given Number of Owls' timeline at the NAC, from it's conception on the west coast, to where it hangs in the NAC today. Originally, we'd hoped that our piece would be projected on to Shadbolt's painting directly or at least on to a replica, but due to the unexpected turn of world health we encountered this year thanks to Covid-19 we were forced to improvise and change the format in which our project was presented. We decided to animate a prototype/demonstrative video to communicate what we hope a final deliverable could look like. Our overall goal with this work was to tell A Given Number of Owls' story in the NAC and recreate the atmospheres it has contributed to in it's time there.