Father-Daughter Show

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Robert Bruce, "Village in Provence," 1935-39

oil on canvas, 21" x 25" (courtesy of Soul Gallery, Winnipeg)

Manitoba artist Katharine Bruce says she never really knew her father, the late artist Robert Bruce, until she took a drawing course from him at the University of Manitoba back in the 1970s.

“I didn’t know him as a human being before then,” Katharine says in an interview from her home in Holmfield, pop. 20, “in the summer,” a stone’s throw from the American border. 

Growing up, initially in the United States and later in Winnipeg, Katharine found her father aloof, the kind of man who conversed little with his family, preferring solitude in his studio.

But as an artist-teacher, he was a different, more approachable, person. Father and daughter bonded in a new way and now, 38 years after his death, the two are having their first joint exhibition in Winnipeg. It’s on at the Soul Gallery from Nov. 3 to Nov. 17.

“Katharine has been deeply affected by her father,” says Julie Walsh, the gallery’s owner.

Both artists in Bruce and Bruce – Father and Daughter have tackled many genres. During the Second World War, Bruce was a public relations staff artist with the Canadian army in Portage la Prairie. But he’s best known for his public murals, commercial art and expressionist and Cubist figures. Katharine favours energetic abstract art but also does landscapes and collages.

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Katherine Bruce, "Agave," 2018

acrylic on canvas with collage, 50" x 50" (courtesy of the artist)

The show will feature about 40 works in total, including some of Robert’s early landscapes and Cubist figures from the 1930s and 1940s that have had little exposure in Canada. Katharine’s half of the show is something of a retrospective.

The artists often take similar approaches, reflecting what Walsh calls “commonality and synergy.” Both echo palettes found in the trademark paintings of the Mexican art colony in San Miguel de Allende, where Robert spent time before his death in 1980. Katharine went there for the first time only 30 years after his death. She now owns a house there, where she spends her winters.

So, what would Robert think about showing with his daughter?

“He would have been very excited,” says Katharine. ■

Bruce and Bruce – Father and Daughter is on view at the Soul Gallery in Winnipeg from Nov. 3 to Nov. 17, 2018.