L.A.C. Panton, 1894 – 1954
Painter, educator, and academic, Lawrence Arthur Colley Panton served in the Army from 1916 to 1919. Upon returning home, he took up art classes at the Ontario College of Art as well as the Central Technical School in Toronto. He worked at Rous and Mann Limited as a designer under Albert H. Robson until 1924, when he began teaching at the Central Technical School.
In ‘Windswept’, an earlier work, Panton shows an ensemble of majestic trees, in the dancing in an elegant movement from the winds or from their internal energies. Through the blackened trunks we look beyond and into the distance at the ever increasing greyness and loss of detail, until only an impression of form is recognized. In a 1954 issue of Saturday Night, it was said “he turned increasingly to abstract forms” and that “there is a strong element of mysticism and a striving to express eternal truths through visual forms.”