As his unusual paintings on gouged plywood began to command international acclaim and commercial success in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Paterson Ewen decided to travel. His time in Europe, Bermuda and the Arctic inspired a number of works, including Sunset over the Mediterranean. Two years later, he would return to Europe to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale.

When he created Sunset over the Mediterranean, Ewen had already experimented extensively with nontraditional media. String, pieces of fabric, nuts and bolts, linoleum and metal found their way into his works of the 1970s. Unlike the Surrealists, who used collage to join objects or images in pairings only logical to the dreamer, Ewen used collage as an effective means to portray weather phenomena or the natural cycles of the sun and moon.

Ewen’s fascination with elemental materials such as metal may also have been inspired by his childhood love of geology. He in fact began his post-secondary studies in that discipline before realizing that “geologists are not so interested in the shapes and colours of formations but in their specific density and other mathematical and scientific data.”¹ Transferring from McGill University to the School of Art and Design at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Ewen would be fortunate enough to find his calling—and to be taught by two icons of the 20^th-century Canadian art scene, Arthur Lismer and Goodridge Roberts.

1. quoted in Joan Murray, Canadian Art in the Twentieth Century (Toronto: Dundurn, 1999), 197.