Peter Shostak’s Nostalgia

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Peter Shostak, “The Ice is Starting to Melt,” no date

oil on canvas, 12” x 24”

If you’re of a certain age and grew up in rural Canada, Peter Shostak’s paintings may resonate. The 75-year-old artist captures times past based on boyhood memories of farm life near Bonnyville, Alta., northeast of Edmonton.

Images in his show, Echoes From the Past, on view at the West End Gallery in Edmonton from Nov. 3 to Nov. 15, include children playing pond hockey amidst snowy fields, sometimes under an immense star-studded sky.

Shostak, who now lives in Comox on Vancouver Island, acknowledges nostalgia is a driving sentiment for his collectors, who include the late American entertainer Bob Hope.

But the generation that grew up in the 1940s and 1950s is starting to recede. And as swathes of farmland are consolidated across the Prairies for economic efficiency, Shostak has found fewer collectors who grew up on farms.

“Things have changed so much, even in the last 10 years,” he says, recalling his boyhood on the two quarter sections farmed by his father, who came from the Ukraine as a young man in 1930.

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Peter Shostak, “I Will Shoot a Bit Higher,” no date

oil on canvas, 14” x 14”

He chuckles at one painting, I Will Shoot a Bit Higher, which shows three boys, one with a slingshot aimed at a wasp nest hanging from a nearby poplar, and recalls how childhood mischief sometimes bit back.

“We made our own fun,” he says. “We would do things, sometimes recklessly.”

Shostak says he has never played hockey on a rink.

“We lived 10 miles from town and 10 miles was a long way,” he says. “Certainly, the parents would not take us into town, for many reasons. One, the roads were usually not that great. And, two, they didn’t think it was important.”

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Peter Shostak, “When Was This Church Built?” no date

oil on canvas, 15” x 30”

During the long winter evenings, Shostak would often draw. Eventually, he studied art at the University of Alberta, going on to earn a graduate degree in art education. He took a teaching position in 1969 at the University of Victoria, where he worked for a decade before he became a full-time artist.

Shostak has received various honours over the years, including the Taras Shevchenko Medal, the highest honour granted by the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, the umbrella group that represents one of the country’s largest ethnic communities. ■

Echoes From the Past is on view at the West End Gallery in Edmonton from Nov. 3 to Nov. 15, 2018.