| ARTIST BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: | Sometimes dubbed a folk painter, sometimes an outsider artist, William Kurelek was known as a writer and a prolific painter of Canadian life. His tormented childhood – documented in his autobiography of 1973, Someone With Me, – his years of mental illness and his didactic, representational style of painting, at a time when Modernism and Abstract Expressionism were in vogue, all ensured that he remained marginalized throughout his life. Born in Depression-era, rural Alberta, the eldest of seven children in a Ukrainian immigrant family, Kurelek grew up in poverty. He was also marked by being bullied at his Winnipeg high school (reflected in his retrospective painting of 1958, “King of the Castle”), and by his alienation from his intolerant father.
William studied literature at the University of Manitoba, solidifying his determination to become an artist. After one year at the Ontario College of Art, he left to hitchhike to Mexico, where he attended the Instituto Allende, fascinated by muralists such as Diego Rivera.
He made his way to England in 1953, where his ongoing mental illness – possibly schizophrenia – was finally addressed at two psychiatric hospitals, both locations that practised art therapy. It was in England that he was introduced to Catholicism.
Kurelek returned to Toronto, and officially became a Catholic in 1957. For the remaining 20 years of his life, he saw his art as a vehicle for religious instruction, producing 160 works on the Passion of Christ alone. He was discovered by Avrom Isaacs, a Toronto gallery owner and art dealer, who hired him as a framer, and gave him his first solo exhibition in 1960. Kurelek’s works were multi-media: pencil, pastel, oil and acrylic. His elaborate frames also formed part of the artwork.
Kurelek’s apocalyptic paintings used literal and symbolic imagery, and increasingly conveyed urgent social messages, concerned with rising secularism and nuclear threat. “This is the Nemesis” (1966) is a hallucinatory depiction of the destruction of Hamilton, Ontario, by nuclear holocaust.
In the late 1960s, with the rise of multiculturalism, Kurelek became interested in other ethnicities, painting series on Inuit, Jewish, French, Irish and Polish Canadians. But he achieved his greatest recognition for his illustrations of the Ukrainian immigrant experience, particularly for A Prairie Boy’s Winter (1973) and A Prairie Boy’s Summer (1975). These became hugely popular Canadian classics, and he twice won the New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Book of the Year award. These seemingly light-hearted, brightly-coloured, approachable works, documenting everyday rural activities, nevertheless harbour dark details and moral messages, and have been compared with the works of Bosch and Brueghel.
Kurelek exhibited across Canada, and left more than 2,000 paintings at the time of his death in Toronto, including many emotionally-charged landscapes. Many of his works are housed at Niagara Falls Art Gallery. In 1976, he was made a Member of the Order of Canada.
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