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James Williamson Galloway Macdonald (1897­–1960), known as Jock MacDonald, was a painter, printmaker, commercial artist, art educator, and active participant in the art community. The first painter to exhibit abstract art in Vancouver, he was a significant player in the development of abstract art in Canada and was committed to using his art to document the spiritual aspects of nature.

Born in Thurso, Scotland, to an artistic family, MacDonald began training as an architect after high school, apprenticing as a draftsman in Edinburgh. After serving in World War One, he attended the Edinburgh College of Art, graduating in 1922 with a diploma in design and an art specialist’s teaching certificate from the Scottish Education Authority. Upon graduation, he married fellow student Barbara Niece. 

MacDonald began his career as a textile designer at Morton Sundour Fabrics before becoming the head of design at the Lincoln School of Art. He spent the rest of his life teaching to support himself while maintaining his artistic practice. In 1926, he moved to Canada after he was awarded a position at the recently established Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts (now Emily Carr University of Art and Design), where he worked until 1933. During this period, he met Fred Varley who introduced him to oil painting and fostered his interest in the landscapes of British Columbia. MacDonald went on to work at a variety of educational institutions, including the British Columbia College of Arts, which he founded with Fred Varley in 1933, the Vancouver School Board, the Provincial Institute of Art and Technology in Calgary, and the Ontario College of Art in Toronto. He was a mentor for a new generation of Canadian artists, introducing them to contemporary artistic expression.

For eighteen months between 1935 and 1936, MacDonald and his family lived on Nootka Island, the first site of sustained contact between Europeans and Indigenous people in what is now called British Columbia. During this time, MacDonald sought to establish an artist colony and develop his own mode of spiritual expression. Just before MacDonald was forced to return to Vancouver due to a back injury, he had an artistic breakthrough, and after months of research and contemplation, he developed his “modalities,” a semi-abstract artistic style based on his spiritual relationship with nature. This style informed his work over the following decade in Vancouver.

In the mid-1940s, MacDonald met Surrealist psychiatrist and lifelong friend Dr. Grace Pailthorpe and artist-poet Ruben Mednikoff. They introduced him to their theory of automatic painting which totally changed MacDonald’s approach to art. There was great interest in his automatic watercolours, and in 1949, he began to experiment with automatic painting using new techniques and mediums. In 1956, he began using commercial paints, including Duco and Lucite 44. While he had struggled to capture the spiritual essence of nature in oil paints, MacDonald was pleased with the effect of the commercial paints and the work was met with critical acclaim from the likes of Clement Greenberg among others.

MacDonald’s work was exhibited extensively across Canada and internationally. In the spring of 1960, the Art Gallery of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario), organized an exhibition that explored the evolution of MacDonald’s work. This exhibition was significant as it was the first retrospective exhibition of a living artist outside of the Group of Seven. An active member in the art community, MacDonald was a founding member of the Canadian Group of Painters, Painters Eleven, and The Calgary Group. He was also an Associate of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and was awarded the Queen’s Coronation Medial in 1953.