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David Pugh was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and raised and educated in Calgary. Primarily self-taught, he studied for a year at the University of Calgary before spending two years during the late nineteen-sixties travelling throughout Canada and the US to look at art, drawing influence for his paintings from works by the Cubist artists and particularly by Juan Gris, Ernst Kirschner, and Georges Braque. During his painting career of twenty-eight years, he earned his livelihood more or less exclusively from his painting, without resorting to teaching or any other kind of support that might distract him from making art. He primarily focused on landscape, particularly that of the Alberta Rockies, and even lived for a time in a one-room cabin on a curve of the Bow River on the edge of Canmore, Alberta where he could be close to the scenery and vistas that he favoured for his work.
In the slanting planes of the Rocky Mountain land formations, he was able to find inspiration for his Cubist-inspired variations of Western Canadian landscape that expressed the monumental power of his subjects. The images that he created found broad appreciation with collectors of Alberta art and his work has been featured in many exhibitions, both during his lifetime and since his passing. It has also been included in a great number of private and public collections.
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