Henry Hunt, VIP Presentation Pole, yellow cedar, 1967. Pegasus Gallery, Salt Spring Island, B.C.

In 1941, the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria opened Thunderbird Park on a small piece of land adjacent to the museum. Centred around the historic Helmcken House on the same site, it was a small but growing collection of authentic examples of northwest coast art — poles, grave markers, and other ceremonial carvings by the Haida, Songhees, Nuu-cha-nulth, and Kwakwaka’wakw people.

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Doug Biden, Untitled, mixed media on paper, 2006, 30" x 22.5".

It’s tempting to wonder if B.C. printmaker Doug Biden had subconscious intimations of his illness and early death. A recurring theme in his work is the visceral anatomy of the human body — skeletons, musculature and organ systems. Certainly, those works took on new poignancy following his death at 50 from pancreatic cancer, particularly as Biden had always lived life to the fullest, cheerfully boyish and ready to play, even in the hallways of UBC Okanagan, where he taught for a decade. He was extremely popular, both with colleagues and students. Indeed, Bob Belton, dean of the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, remembers Biden as “a great bon-vivant”.

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Jack Lee McLean, Douglas Lake Ranch, Grassy Hills, oil on canvas, c.1975, 20" X 28".

Jack Lee McLean may not be a household name in the contemporary Western Canadian visual arts community, but he created more than 1500 paintings during his lifetime. His work has been criticized as too illustrative, formulaic and sentimental, though it reflects the ranching culture of the mid 20th century — the solitary life of the cowboy and his horse. Despite the sentimentality, to those who know and understand ranch life, McLean’s paintings are an honest interpretation of the relationship between man, horse and land. The titles of his paintings evoke a place and time — “Scouting the Pass,” “Trapper’s Pass,” “Cold Journey,” “Chasing Wild Mustangs”, “Heading Out” — that gets into the heart of the popular image of the west.

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Llewellyn Petley-Jones, Self Portrait, Horseshoe Bay, oil on canvas, 1951, 58" X 48".

Llewellyn Petley-Jones moved to Horseshoe Bay in the early 1950s, when it was little more than a settlement of scattered cottages around a small marina, a considerable journey north from downtown Vancouver. He had just returned to Canada following a successful 15-year period in Europe, where he had been mingling in cafes with artists like Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.

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Kenneth Gordon, TANU (Q.C.I.), oil on canvas, 1993, 40" x 30".

Manitoba artist Kenneth Gordon lived several lives — as an art educator, founder of Winnipeg’s Medea Gallery and later as a full-time painter. He spent more than two decades at Winnipeg’s R.B. Russell Vocational High School as an art instructor — one of his lush landscapes still hangs in the staff room of the school. After retiring from teaching, he re-located to the quiet town of Winnipeg Beach, north of Winnipeg, becoming a full-time painter and dedicating his life’s work to capturing the beauty and depth of the Canadian landscape.

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LeRoy Jensen, Quiet Grief, oil on canvas, 1996, 16" x 24"

In his figurative drawings and paintings, Salt Spring Island artist LeRoy Jensen expressed a deep capacity for empathy and compassion, an interest in representing the human condition. His artistic process reflects a unique fusion of traditional and modern painterly practices that mix academic techniques with modernist formal ideals. He began each painting with a foundation drawing, then, working from the specific to the general, he added high contrast areas and colour, covering the original drawing in thick, sensuous paint. The final results were spontaneous and direct, but his expressive freedom was built upon a well-defined armature.

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Margaret Shelton: My Tent watercolour on paper, 1965, 9.75" x 15"

Picture an image of a young Margaret Shelton pedaling down the uneven highway from Calgary to Banff, her paint box, sketchbook and camping gear affixed to her bicycle. Eventually she’d pull over to paint something — a grain elevator, a tractor, a mountain, a mine — whatever struck her. “She painted everything,” says Jill Clark, director of The Collector’s Gallery of Art in Calgary, which represents Shelton’s estate.

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Jean-Paul Riopelle: Abstract Composition (detail), oil on canvas, 1950 IMAGE COURTESY MASTERS GALLERY, CALGARY

Taken from a purely intellectual point of view, Jean-Paul Riopelle led a charmed life. Present for a remarkable number of monumental creative discoveries during the 20th century, his work reflected the zeitgeist of a mid-century Parisian aesthetic that combined favourably with his Canadian roots. Quite possibly the most recognized internationally of any Quebec-born artist, his work still strongly resonates both in that province and across the country.

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William Kurelek: Sunday Dinner Call in the Bush, 1961, mixed media on panel, 17" x 48" Image Courtesy Mayberry Fine Art, Winnipeg

For his highly detailed folk art depicting life on the Canadian prairie during the first half of the 20th century, William Kurelek could be compared to Laura Ingalls Wilder, another chronicler of the beauty and ordinariness of life on western homesteads. But Kurelek, whose meticulous depictions are best known through his books A Prairie Boy's Summer and A Prairie Boy's Winter, went much deeper than that. (continue...)

Emily Carr: Dark Forest (circa 1935), oil on canvas, 13.75" x 18"

Emily Carr was Canada’s most famous female painter when she died in 1945 at the age of 74, but her hard-won reputation followed decades of obscurity and arrived only when she was in her 60s.
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A.Y. Jackson: Mountain Ash, Grace Lake Oil on panel, October 1940 10 1/2" x 13 1.2"

After his father abandoned the family, Alexander Young Jackson began working for a Montreal lithography company at the age of 12. By 1914 he was sharing a studio in Toronto with Tom Thomson and painting regularly in Algonquin Park. In the 1920s Jackson joined the Group of Seven and began exhibiting with them, and throughout his career he interpreted Canadian identity through the environment.
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Tom Thomson: Birch Grove Algonquin Park, 1915, oil on board, 10.5" x 8.5"

A popular misconception is that Tom Thomson was a member of the Group of Seven. He wasn’t, although he is considered one of Canada’s most important artists and is credited with influencing – even instigating – the Group’s distinct approach to portraying the Canadian landscape.
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Nicholas Grandmaison: Straw Hat, circa 1940, pastel, 28" x 21" paper

After serving in the Russian army during WWI, Nicholas de Grandmaison made his way to England to study at the St. John’s Wood Art School in London. Further studies followed in Paris before he immigrated to Canada in 1923 and settled in Banff. (continue...)

untitled, circa 1950, Sanikiluak (Belsher Islands), stone, coloured medium, 8" h x 5.5" w x 5.5" d

BY Rod Chapman

ONLY A LITTLE OVER 50 YEARS OLD, THIS UNTITLED SCULPTURE OF THREE STONE OWLS IS PART OF A REMARKABLE COLLECTION OF FORGOTTEN WORKS BY UNKNOWN INUIT CARVERS.

Douglas Banks, a mining engineer and executive in Toronto, collected Inuit art for several summers in the late 1940s and early 1950s while working on the Belcher Islands in southeastern Hudson Bay. At the time, the commercial carving industry that was emerging in communities across the North at the urging of James Houston had not appeared in the Belcher Islands — little, if anything, appears from this region before 1954. (continue...)

Kathleen Moir Morris, Old Mill, St. Sauveur, Quebec, pre-1932, with a Walter Klinkhoff Gallery label on the back, oil on panel, 10.5" x 14"

Kathleen Moir morris (1893 - 1996)

Born in Montreal in 1893, Kathleen Moir Morris achieved critical acclaim during the lively Quebec art scene of the 1920s and ’30s, but since then has languished as one of an almost-forgotten group of Canadian women painters. (continue...)