Shadbolt taught at the Vancouver School of Art from 1938 to 1966 and was an important contributor to the development of abstraction and modernism in this region and in Canada. Indeed, he is widely regarded as one of Canada’s most important artists of the 20th C. and his work has continued to appreciate in value and reach an ever-growing audience since his death in 1998. A.J. Kristiansen, in a 1990, exhibition catalogue observed “on one level, Shadbolt's paintings participate in the international dialogue of twentieth century modernism and post modernism…[but] unlike his eastern contemporaries, Shadbolt's primitivist interests were local - Northwest Coast aboriginal art. Even his 1980's works, which in a global sense can be seen as connected to the ecological movement, are site specific. They represent the landscape of B.C."

Shadbolt's work is represented in all major public collections in Canada and in numerous corporate and private collections. He was the recipient of many awards throughout his career and with his wife Doris established the VIVA Foundation, which provides funding for visual artists. Shadbolt died in 1998.

About this image: In his monograph Jack Shadbolt (1990), Scott Watson interprets the Hockey Owl series as an evolution of the artist's ongoing exploration of ritual and fetish forms. Shadbolt envisioned the masked goalie as the fetish figure "par excellence in Canadian culture today." In this series, the artist transformed the owl into a hockey player by painting jersey numbers like overlapping bird feathers. According to Watson, Shadbolt intended the series to be comic but there is also a dark side to these images where the figures "disintegrate into fields of destabilizing energy" (Watson, p.149).