The diamond-shaped “Fram” features a deliberate spontaneity, a contained openness that sets David Bolduc apart from his Colour Field predecessors, such as his older friend Jack Bush. The pattern and saturated hues hark back to Matisse, whose 1970 centenary exhibition Bolduc had admired at the Grand Palais in Paris. The central fan motif, which recurs in other works from this period, “is `neither here nor there”; rather its importance is `as a carrier for colour.'” At the same time, the purely squeezed markings read as indecipherable signs, perhaps gleaned from his methodical work in the conservation department of the Royal Ontario Museum, or from his observations as a world traveller. In the 1970s, Bolduc described his paintings as “not really pictures, they’re imaginative mood things; one is creating something that is like a souvenir of something.”