Norma Wright-Cotter

Norma Wright-Cotter (1891-1980)

Norma Wright-Cotter's formal artistic training began in her teens when she studied drawing with Charles MacDonald Manly and painting with Thomas Garland Greene at the Ontario Ladies' College in Whitby, Ontario. Cotter became a good acquaintance of Manly’s and at one point rented his cottage at Conestoga on the river, where she executed a number of paintings, including a scene of Manly standing by the river. Cotter also understudied with Florence McGillivray, whom she succeeded as resident art teacher at the College in 1911. There is a distinct body of work from Cotter’s “Whitby years,” when Cotter was “closely aligned with the emerging Canadian art movement of the time”; this early Canadian period shows strong influence of the work of James Wilson Morrice, Florence McGillivray, and her teachers Manly and Greene. This early work was exhibited at the McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa under the title “Whitby Years.” She studied art in New York as well, then married Charles Sylvester Cotter and moved to his plantation home in Jamaica. Cotter later moved to New York City, where she studied commercial art at the School of Fine and Applied Art in 1922. The following year Cotter met and soon married Charles Sylvester Cotter, and the couple moved to his plantation home in Jamaica, where she spent the remainder of her life and produced the bulk of her oeuvre. Her Jamaica subjects were her signature works: landscapes of mountains, sea, and palm trees, and depictions of local residents, rich in details of everyday life in Jamaica. Her early work shows Canadian style and influence, but as Cotter continued painting she developed her own style that showed a fascination in colour, pattern, and repetition. In 1944, Cotter’s work was featured in an exhibition held at the Institute of Jamaica in Kingston, Jamaica. After Cotter’s death, her son Graham Cotter helped organize an exhibition of her work at the Parkdale branch of the Toronto Public Library in 1981.