Excerpt from
Ann MacIntosh Duff

Throughout her long and wide-ranging career, Ann MacIntosh Duff (1925–2022) returned again and again to one place: her boathouse studio on Scotch Pine Island in Georgian Bay. In large part iterating the same set of images—views from her porch, craggy shorelines of the lake in the distance, constellations, personal possessions such as binoculars, cameras, butterfly nets, books—MacIntosh Duff’s watercolours reveal a perpetual fascination with eliciting new information from familiar material, revelling in nature, the joys of perception, and the act of artmaking. Having perfected a unique technique of watercolour painting that involved soaking the entire paper before working, MacIntosh Duff demonstrates a mastery of how and when to control colour and line, and also how and when to let them take their own, often abstracted, course. The results are artworks that can be at once dreamy and piercingly essential, scenes that enchant yet carry a fundamental truth of how we see our world.  

As summer winds down, we wanted to share an excerpt from Ann MacIntosh Duff, a book published in honour of the McMichael’s accession of two hundred works from the MacIntosh Duff estate. The following is an excerpt from an essay by the award-winning filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal, who was the late artist’s dear friend: 

Watercolour has a reputation for being “feminine” (read: sentimental). Ann’s work is anything but. While there is a profound sensitivity to her vision, her mark making is rigorously considered, and the simplicity is full of depth. When I think of the art world that she inhabited—dominated by men, the grand gesture, and the cult of personality—I am still astonished that she so clearly steered her own course, with such steadfast quiet discipline and resolve. Ann painted the same landscapes as more celebrated male artists—the islands and waters of Georgian Bay, depicted perhaps most famously by the Group of Seven. Over the past century, the heroic, rugged individualism of their vision has been ingrained in us as the norm. When I look at those paintings, I sometimes feel that I am being asked to admire the view, and the artistic accomplishment, from a distance. With Ann’s work I can immediately enter—I am somehow included there. She’s made a space. Her paintings say, “Come into this world with me.” And I find it irresistible to do so, every time I look at them. 

Ann eschewed the Ontario College of Art for Central Tech, wanting to learn, as she said, technique instead of attitude. For her, painting was a vocation as well as an art. She insisted on framing her own work. The physicality of her practice—running back and forth with large sheets of paper from tabletop to lakeside or across the studio in Toronto, the built-in constraints of time—required both athleticism and unwavering commitment to the present.

During her childhood, Ann’s parents would call her to dinner only once, to inform without interrupting. Her capacity for sustained concentration is likely why she hated having visitors at the island in summer. She would spend her mornings looking and her afternoons painting what she saw. Someone so comfortable with the possibilities of solitude is, in my experience, rare. She was alone without being lonely. 

Ann’s work brims with an understanding of the multitudes contained within the quotidian, the sublime in the ordinary. The camera, the radio, the bed, the binoculars, the spoon and bowl, the stillness of the water at midday, the vase of flowers, the view beyond the kitchen counter at dusk. Our interactions with the everyday in large part define our lives. Ann gave these moments careful and sustained consideration. She knew that they could reveal deeper connective meaning, and I have thought a lot about her way of apprehending the world in my own work as a filmmaker. 

Ann was not a capital F feminist, because the term was not in use when she was forging her own career and making her own rules. There was no movement to join, no bandwagon to jump on, no safety in numbers. To me, this makes her cultivation of a singular artistic voice all the more extraordinary. Listening to her muse, guided by her values, she calmly rejected the paths that society prescribed to her. She created, then spent her life exploring, her own.