The extraordinary life and art of one of Canada's most exciting painters

Harold Barling Town (1924 - 1990) began drawing as a three-year-old and never stopped. A prodigious worker, his oeuvre totals some 9,000 works - paintings, collages, monoprints, lithographs, silk screens and linocuts, as well as assemblages, sculptures and murals. A founding member of Painters Eleven, the group that propelled Abstract Expressionism to the forefront in Canada in 1953, Town gained international recognition for his technically inventive Single Autographic Prints. They were shown at the 1956 Venice Biennale and won him his first of numerous international prizes at Ljubljana, Yugoslavia (now Slovenia), in 1957. His work is held in the world's renowned art museums - the Tate Modern, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Galleria d'Arte, Lugano, Switzerland, among them. Alfred H. Barr, MoMA director, held Town in high regard as printmaker, and MoMA was the first international museum to purchase his work. In this definitive monograph, Iris Nowell presents a dazzling account of the life and art of Harold Town. Her insightful text is accompanied by 120 reproductions of Town's work highlighting his epic, brilliant career.

Iris Nowell is the author of six books as well as countless newspaper and magazine articles on topics ranging from sports to social issues. She was the first of the new generation of women to write on the sports pages of The Globe and Mail. Her subsequent work includes the well-received Women Who Give Away Millions: Portraits of Canadian Philanthropists and the artist biography Joyce Wieland: A Life in Art and her memoir Hot Breakfast for Sparrows: My Life with Harold Town. Nowell lives in Toronto.

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