Passages of indigo, red, white, violet and green explode from a soaked ground of sapphire blue in this acrylic on canvas by Paul Fournier. This large painting is a celebration of light and color in the Arafura Sea that lies west of the Pacific Ocean between Australia and New Guinea. Framed size is 49.75 x 69 inches.

Paul Fournier is considered part of a group of third-generation non-figurative painters who studied and worked in Toronto during the 1960s. He soon became known for his use of bright fauvist colors for which he was dubbed an "exotic modernist" by New York art critic Donald Kuspit.

Fournier has had major solo exhibitions in Toronto, Guelph, Hamilton, Edmonton, Houston and Washington, D.C. His work was selected by critic Andrew Hudson for 14 Canadians: A Critic's Choice at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and by Boston Museum of Fine Arts curator Kenworth Moffett for inclusion in The new Generation: A Curator's Choice at the Andre Emmerich Gallery in New York.

In 1996, Fournier received an Honorary Doctor of Laws from Sir Wilfrid Laurier University. His paintings and graphics have been exhibited throughout Canada, the United States and Europe and are included in most major public collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Tate Museum, as well as in private collections in the United States, South America and Europe.

"...Paul Fournier’s canvases seemed typical of his generation of Toronto painters. Like his colleagues K. M. Graham, Daniel Solomon, Paul Hunter and David Bolduc, Fournier demonstrated an almost Fauvist sense of color and an ability to be both playful and lyrical in the same picture. Like them, too, he clearly admired Matisse and Jack Bush. Yet Fournier’s pictures were and have remained stubbornly personal, in a challenging territory of his own, a narrow zone between reference and invention." Karen Wilkin, Canadian Art, 1991.

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