| ARTIST BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: | Hazel Litzgus is considered a leader in the Canadian Folk Art genre. She grew up on a farm outside Lloydminster, AB, and specializes in scenes from her prairie childhood: vignettes of small-town life as it was then, of farm work and play. Hazel had some formal training in anatomical drawing at the then-Edmonton Art Gallery, but is mostly self-taught. She works in watercolours in vivid colours; her use of perspective, seen from above, recalls the naïve style. The images present themselves to her intuitively, ready-made, and are triggered by the daily events of the year. Her works were originally created for her young daughter as a way of sharing her memories and knowledge of times past.
In 2003, she published a book of illustrations and stories, Where the Meadowlark Sang: Cherished Scenes from an Artist’s Childhood. Organized by season, each page contains one colour illustration and a line drawing, plus a short prose passage about life on the Alberta farm where Litzgus grew up. The work was selected as “Our Choice” by the Canadian Children’s Book Centre.
Litzgus’ works have been shown across Canada and the world, including at the National Gallery of Canada, and at Canada House in London. She has had solo exhibitions at the Glenbow Museum, Masters Gallery, and The Collectors’ Gallery of Art, Calgary; and has been part of travelling group exhibitions put on by the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. She has been featured in books such as An Alberta Art Chronicle: Adventures in Recent and Contemporary Art (Altitude Press); Prairie Women: Images in Canadian and American Fiction (Yale University Press), and Artists of Alberta (University of Alberta Press), amongst others. One of her works was presented to Queen Elizabeth II by the City of Calgary on a royal visit to Alberta.
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