William Perehudoff was a Canadian abstract painter whose career spanned the twentieth century. In the early 1960s he attended several of the Emma Lake workshops held by Kenneth Noland and Clement Greenberg. Greenberg was an enormously influential art critic who advocated for “formalist” painting: abstract works that explored colours, forms, textures, and compositional space rather than representation. Noland was a prominent American Colour Field painter. Along with Jack Bush, Perehudoff was a pioneer of Canadian abstract painting.

By the 1980s Perehudoff developed a method of bleeding paints across unprimed canvas to create a wash of colour. This style was influenced by American painters like Helen Frankenthaler. Here the blue wash is punctuated by thick strokes of saturated blue, burgundy, brown, and green. Each colour was applied in a single, confident gesture. Together they trace the artist's movement around the canvas and create a dynamic visual rhythm.

Perehudoff's works are held in the public collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, the Glenbow-Alberta Institute, and the Canada Council Art Bank, among others. Private and corporate collections include the Bank of Montreal, RBC, Scotiabank, the Four Seasons, and the collection of HM Queen Elizabeth.