Talk of the Town

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Molly Lamb Bobak, “Oslo,” 1960

conté wash on paper, 16” x 22” (Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, purchased with the financial support of the Canada Council Joint Purchase Award and the Vancouver Art Gallery Women’s Auxiliary, VAG 61.39; photo by Rachel Topham)

Molly Lamb Bobak was fascinated with crowds. They appear in many of her paintings – masses of people that swarm beaches and city streets, skate on rivers or play in schoolyards. And though Bobak, who was born in Vancouver in 1920, also created notable florals and cityscapes, it’s her crowd paintings that draw the most acclaim. They form the foundation of Talk of the Town, an exhibition of 24 of her works, on view at the Burnaby Art Gallery in Greater Vancouver until April 8.

Bobak’s figures, often faceless and loosely drawn with few details, compel through their gestures and relationships with others in the scene. It’s easy to overlook the lack of precision and enjoy the vivid zeitgeist of throngs of people, often exuberant and full of life.

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Molly Lamb Bobak, “The Procession,” 1953

charcoal on paper, 23” x 29” (Collection of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, gift of Harold Mortimer Lamb, AN 1957.013.001; photo by Stephen Topfer)

But not all her images emanate happiness. The Procession, a charcoal drawing set in London, shows mourners walking behind a funeral hearse. Their heads are mostly cast downward, shoulders slumped. In the foreground, near a ladder leaning against a lightstand, workers watch the procession as the banal activities of life continue despite the intensity of the moment.

Bobak’s botanical watercolours comprise a second corpus of recognized work. In the exhibition catalogue, curator Hilary Letwin notes how the painter compares flowers to people: “They come and go. They’re so fragile. They grow. They’re not organized. I love painting crowds of them.” The one floral image in the show, Daisies, is an undated oil painting from the City of Burnaby’s permanent collection.

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Molly Lamb Bobak, “The Chicken Shop,” circa 1951

oil on panel, 32” x 40” (courtesy of Kate Clark; photo by Chris Phillips)

Not all of Bobak’s figurative works focus on large groups of people. A painting from Paris, The Chicken Shop, shows a man with his back to the viewer standing in front of crates filled with live chickens. The merchant and the shoppers, typically for Bobak, have no facial features. Yet, somehow, their anticipation radiates.

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Molly Lamb Bobak, “Cornish Town #2,” 1957

oil on canvas, 24” x 40” (Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery Purchase Fund, VAG 58.9; photo by Rachel Topham)

The show features several panoramic cityscapes, including places in Europe that Bobak visited in the 1950s and 1960s. In Cornish Town #2, for instance, urban buildings are set against a green countryside carved up by roadways. The sky is either clearing after a rainstorm, or about to darken with storm clouds. Orange blots and red outlines on some of the gray houses brighten the painting.

The work’s overall patterning is reminiscent of Paul Cézanne, an influence on Bobak during her student days at the Vancouver School of Art. One of her teachers, Jack Shadbolt, had introduced her to Cézanne’s paintings. Bobak wrote of this awakening: “What Cézanne could do with an apple or a glass decanter! One could see layers of watercolour over surfaces and taut blue strokes shattering around the edges, open, moving. Suddenly, you weren’t looking at apples or decanters any more, but painting. I almost went crazy.”

During the Second World War, Bobak was the first Canadian woman to be sent overseas as an official war artist. She returned to Vancouver for a short time in the 1950s before moving with her husband, painter Bruno Bobak, to Fredericton, N.B. She died there in 2014. ■

Molly Lamb Bobak: Talk of the Town continues at the Burnaby Art Gallery until April 8, 2018.