McEwen was born in 1923 Montreal to a Scottish father and French-Canadian mother.[4] He began his working life as a pharmacist, having received a degree in pharmacy from the University of Montreal in 1947.[5]
McEwen was self-taught as a painter. The first exhibition of his work was in the 1949 Annual Spring Exhibition, a group show at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.[6]
Following the positive reception of his work as a painter in Montreal, he quit his job as a pharmacist and left Montreal for Paris, encouraged to meet Jean-Paul Riopelle.[5][6] In Paris, he was introduced to the painters Riopelle, Georges Mathieu and Sam Francis as well as visiting museums in Italy, Holland and Spain.[6] On his return to Montreal in 1953, he was committed to non-figurative art, influenced by French impressionism and American abstract expressionism.[2]
In 1956, he participated in Galerie Actuelle's Montreal exhibition of non-figurative art,[7] which was his true starting point.[4] That same year, he became a member of the newly formed multi-faceted Non-Figurative Artists' Association of Montreal, and in 1960, he was elected its president.[8] In 1961, McEwen received the Hadassah prize and first prize at the Concours artistiques de la province de Québec, as well as a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. In the same year, he also had his first solo show at Gallery Moos, in Toronto, and Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, acquired one of his paintings for the Museum of Modern Art, which contributed to his reputation among the vanguard of Canadian artists.[8][5]
In the works of his maturity, McEwen employed an allover field composition bisected by a central vertical but varied colour and ways of handling pigment, either brushed on or applied with a palette knife for a rich impasto surface effect.[2] He used many layers of pigment to give an effect of luminosity and shimmering light.[8]
McEwen took part in many exhibitions, both in Canada and abroad, among them the Biennial Exhibitions of Canadian Art and the Province of Quebec Exhibition. In 1963, he showed his work in New York at the Martha Jackson Gallery and after that, in many places abroad, notably Brazil and England.[8]
^ abcdeA Dictionary of Canadian Artists, volumes 1-8 by Colin S. MacDonald, and volume 9 (online only), by Anne Newlands and Judith Parker National Gallery of Canada / Musée des beaux-arts du Canada
