| ARTIST BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: | Mary Lou Crerar grew up in rural British Columbia, where her father worked at a powerhouse. Her artistic abilities evidenced themselves at an early age and the landscape of her youth has influenced her paintings throughout her career. She received a B.A. in Geography from the University of British Columbia (1950), for which her drawing skill was useful and which aided her understanding of landscape. She attended the Vancouver School of Art, where she studied with the Canadian war artist Molly Lamb Bobak. She won the Leo and Thea Koerner Art Scholarship to study at the U.B.C. School of Fine Arts with artist Jacques de Tonnacour. In 1962, she moved to Toronto, ON, where for three years she studied Japanese brush painting with Kazuo Hamasaki and Priest Tanahashi. Her paintings were accepted for exhibition by the Academy of Sumi-e in Osaka, Japan. She has additionally exhibited in solo shows in Vancouver, Victoria, and Ottawa, Canada, and has exhibited in group shows in Canada and the United States. Her work is held in the collections of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Sunshine Village Art Foundation.
In Crerar’s work, viewers might travel through miles of landscape in the joyous moods of spring, the green and moist moods of summer and the serene moods of winter. The Canadian floral and landscape subjects rendered with classical Japanese techniques of brush and rice paper offer a liberation of viewers’ eyes from what they usually see and present a new vision.
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