Provenance

The Isaacs Gallery, Toronto

Collection of Ken Thomson, Toronto

Gifted to The Art Gallery of Ontario, 2004

Kurelek’s text on the back of the painting states:

This is a family joy idea, combined with the joy of creativity. It came from meditation, you might say, on French Canadian crafts on display in Montreal. The outdoor oven you see in the picture I can’t recall actually seeing in the Quebec countryside, though I know they are still around. My experience of them dates to childhood in Alberta, where Ukrainian pioneers used them. I too was born in a large family, though perhaps not as large as French Canadian ones used to be. We were 9 altogether and my mother used to regularly bake bread from flour bought in 100 pound sacks. This is a more natural way to prepare and eat food- not the way we get it now in small, prepackaged quantities artificially preserved. The French Canadian family had to knuckle down to cooperative effort, which can, sometimes, actually be a joy. I’ve tried to show that on the mother‘s face. And the father looks happy too as he admires his latest figurine. A man who can provide for his family, no matter how simple their lifestyle, from the sale of creative work is a blessed person. I well know that from personal experience.

William Kurelek depicted countless scenes of diverse individuals, events and locations across Canada, from the everyday to the extraordinary. A prolific artist, he completed well over 2,000 paintings and drawings before his premature death in 1977. The Canadian landscape had emerged as a dominant subject in the work of the Alberta-born, Manitoba raised artist after he resettled in Toronto from England in 1959. The same year, he met Avrom Isaacs, of Isaacs Gallery, who invited him to work in his gallery’s frame shop and hosted Kurelek’s first solo exhibition in 1960. In 1962, Kurelek married Jean Andrews and they relocated to the Beaches area in Toronto. By the middle of the decade, in the wake of the country’s Centennial, his landscapes began assuming a more nationalistic tenor. What distinguished Kurelek’s nationalist vision from that of previous Canadian artists was the emphasis he placed on regional and multicultural diversity.

This painting was completed in 1974, shortly after Kurelek exhibited his Toronto Series at The Isaacs Gallery in fall 1972, and thus was looking for inspiration from new Canadian terrain. Possibly from his series on French Canadian life, this work depicts a family idyll. It is an ode to the woodcarvers the artist met when he first visited Quebec. A man carves a figure, while his wife and children look on. He spent a significant amount of time in Quebec during this time, observing family life inside and outside of Montreal, and drawing parallels to his own upbringing. The artist would go on to create the Montreal Revisited

Series in 1975. The Woodcarver’s Family serves as a testament of how the artist valued and reflected on all facets of our multicultural national identity.