James Agrell Smith - A Broader Picture: Drawings, Paintings and Original Prints

A Broader Picture: Drawings, Paintings and Original Prints

By Mary Beth Laviolette

I think art is a way of life‌ a glorious way in which a man can live. ď “

James Agrell Smith

On Exhibition August 17 to November 11, 2013

On the Cover: SELF, N.D. Wood Engraving 7 x 6 inches Private Collection Left: SELF-PORTRAIT, 1964 Sumi ink on paper 22 ½ x 30 inches Collection of Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton AB, 75.2

Introduction James Agrell Smith: A Broader Picture – Drawings, Paintings and Original Prints brings together for the first time a comprehensive selection of his wood engravings and rarely exhibited paintings and works on paper. In the centenary year of the artist’s birth (1913), broadening the perspective on Smith’s oeuvre is both timely and insightful. In doing so, another chapter in the history of early Alberta art is revealed; centered on a practitioner like Smith who, in common with his artistic peers lived and worked in the young province. Prior to their presence and commitment, it was itinerant artists and visitors who had recorded and interpreted the region.

Born before the end of World War One, this generation, often with little recognition and support, established over the course of several decades a professional art community.

Despite Smith’s isolation, sometimes selfimposed to protect his privacy, he was an integral part of this larger story. His contribution began in the post-war period when after sixteen years in the Royal Canadian Navy and nearly seven years in Chilliwack, B.C., Smith returned to Alberta as an artist with considerable skill and promise.

The subjects he pursued in Red Deer, Alberta were unusual for his time. For one thing, he was not a landscape artist. With some exceptions, Smith was a figurative artist; preferring to record and interpret the human dimension of his surroundings. This included his many engravings of Red Deer’s local inhabitants, depictions of his wife Grace, son, Ken, and others he knew, as well as a surprising number of self-portraits. The artist also depicted birds, horses in a rural environment and the callous destruction of wildlife.

Among his peers in Western Canada, this enduring commitment to the figurative puts Smith into a category where few others were actively engaged. But whatever the difference in subject matter between Smith and his Albertan peers like Margaret Shelton (1915-1984) and Illingworth Kerr (1905-1989), in common they shared the following sentiment once expressed so succinctly by the central Alberta artist: “…I am of the prairies… I believe I would do these [images] wherever I was in the world and they wouldn’t be any different.”1 1

Interview with James Agrell Smith by Helen K. Wright, February 7, 1973. Glenbow Museum Artist Files, Calgary AB.

Art as a Way of Life Born in Stettler, Alberta, the second of five children with a sickly aged father, he joined the Royal Canadian Navy as boy seaman at age 17 in 1931. Even then, James Agrell Smith had ambitions to be an artist when as a vocation it was little understood or appreciated.

Professional training in the province was in its infancy and so, not surprisingly, he was a self-taught artist. But more than self-taught or self-developed, Smith was a self-made artist.

A role he realised on his terms and his terms only. It began with his years of service in the navy where Smith proceeded to become well-read and informed about art. The latter greatly enhanced by off-duty visits to art collections in both London and New York.

By the time Smith had settled with his family in Red Deer after 1954 he required no guidance about what it meant to be an ‘artist’.

A term Smith later recalled he actually never cared for, preferring to describe himself as a ‘printmaker or a painter’2. Still, on the matter of art he was clear and unwavering, once remarking: “I think art is a way of life,” and “a glorious way in which a man can live.”3 Smith’s way of life encompassed two streams of artistic practice: works on paper and paintings as well as original prints. Of the latter, there are recorded thirty-two black and white wood engravings and two woodcuts.

Smith’s reputation rests on this body of work; juried or curated into over thirty exhibitions from 1950 to 1979. Recognition also came in 1953 when the artist was the first Westerner to receive the George A. Reid Memorial award for his vivid wood engraving, Cariboo Cowboy (1952)4.

2 3 4

Ibid. p.14 Ibid. p. 12 An award from The Society of Canadian Painters-Etchers and Engravers. Smith was elected to the society in 1950; Associate Member, 1952 and a Full member in 1954.

CARIBOO COWBOY, 1952 wood engraving 8 x 6 inches Private Collection

An Artful Beginning with Painting and Works on Paper The number of paintings and works on paper the artist produced is not known.

This encompasses paintings executed in egg tempera, oil paint or dry brush watercolour and works on paper in graphite, charcoal or Sumi ink. The exhibition record for these artworks includes several group exhibitions in Halifax, Victoria and Vancouver in the 1940s and one, much later, in 1974 at the Edmonton Art Gallery. The record is definitely sparser but a fuller picture of the artist cannot be attained without attention to this formative and important stream of work.

Seventeen paintings and works on paper were selected for James Agrell Smith: A Broader Picture – Drawings, Paintings and Original Prints. The earliest work on display is a 1943 egg tempera on gessoed masonite; the most recent a 1984

A Broader Picture: Drawings, Paintings and Original Prints

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Somewhere along the way Smith must of have also immersed himself in the painting of the early Italian Renaissance. This is because at one point he had access to D.V. Thompson’s 1933 translation of Cennino Cennini’s 14th century, Il libro dell’arte, or, as it is known in English, The Craftsman’s Handbook. Devoted to the how-to’s of tempera painting then in use in the Renaissance, three of Smith’s paintings from the Halifax period are realised in this ancient and not commonly used medium.

PORTRAIT OF A RED-BEARDED SAILOR, 1943 egg tempera on gessoed masonite 20 x 16 inches Estate of the Artist

oil on canvas. From the 1940s, are represented five paintings and one work on paper. Four are portraits and executed in either graphite, oil on canvas board or egg tempera on gessoed panel. As an early example of his portraits, they are rendered with considerable skill and sensitivity. At the time, Smith was stationed in Halifax; already well into his naval service which had once included training in England.

In an interview later in his life, the artist recalled how when off-duty, he was sometimes able to visit London’s National Gallery. The first opportunity was in 1935.

It was like a revelation! This is what I needed.

I didn’t need that little prairie town…I saw [Augustus] John’s, [Stanley] Spencer’s, I saw [Jacob] Epstein’s, I saw all these people and there’s where I formed my vision of art.5

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Interview with James Agrell Smith, ibid. p.14

Among them is Portrait of a Red Bearded Sailor (1943) and Portrait of Artist’s Wife (1947) whose composition and mood recalls the still repose of well-to-do Italians painted six hundred years ago. When viewed from the perspective of modern art and its developments in the early 20th century, the tempera paintings by Smith – including a cordial gathering of sailors on a wharf titled Sailors’ Reunion (Victoria), (1943) – look dated. But more than sixty years later, these images have a freshness and clarity. They also display an unsentimental but high regard for their subjects and are technically very accomplished egg temperas. Who would have guessed they were made by an aspiring artist?

A Sense of Identity – Smith’s Self-Portraits By contrast, the oil on canvas board is more contemporary in execution. Titled simply, Self (1945), it represents, over a forty-year span of practice, one of the many selfportraits Smith drew, painted or engraved.

The only parallel regionally to these striking works are the self-portraits of James Nicoll (1892-1986) in Calgary. In Self (1945), the outward gaze of the portrait’s subject is penetrating yet cautious; revealing of someone who perhaps feels that life has cut him no slack. At the time of its making, the artist recalled being assigned to the ‘milk-run’6 between St. John’s, Newfoundland and New York City. It was wartime but also another instance where he was able to immerse 6

Ibid.p.15

himself, while off-duty and away from the turbulence of war, in the richness of New York’s Metropolitan Museum. There, amongst the displays of art, Smith said he “learned to measure myself against.”7 Concluding, he had “no illusions about my incompetence as an artist, simply because I had no opportunity to serve my apprenticeship.”8 Painted in 1945, Self, in a sense, emphatically conveys not only Smith’s presence as an individual but also as someone who would shape their own destiny – whatever the shortcomings.

Years later when another work is rendered, this time titled Self-Portrait (1964), the transformation is complete. A work in Sumi ink, featured is Smith the artist, in a white apron staring intently at the viewer. With his trademark cap on his head and lit cigarette, this dispassionate portrayal betrays none of the earlier angst or what his son, Ken, refers to as “his grim determination to learn his craft and his art.”9 A large work on paper, Self-Portrait (1964) was included a decade later in the group exhibition, Alberta Realists (Edmonton Art Gallery, 1974). For the first time, its creator found himself recognized as a contemporary realist and not that far removed from the efforts of such young up-and-comers as Gary Olson, John Hall, William Parker and Dulcie Foo Fat. Writing about their brand of realism, curator Nancy Townshend observed, “Most works by Alberta realists are sharp focus, precise representations; in fact, they give more details than the eye can perceive in actuality…”10 In the case of Smith’s own practice, he had always been a realist despite being aware that in the postwar art world including distant Alberta, abstract art was the favoured child. His commitment to realism also applied to his original prints (engravings and woodcuts) which from 1950 to the early 1970s were his main preoccupation.

7 8 9 10

Ibid.

Ibid.

Interview with Ken & Heather Agrell-Smith, Sherwood Park AB, February 18 & 19, 2013.

Nancy Townshend. Alberta Realists, The Edmonton Art Gallery, November 29-December 29, 1974, unpaginated.

PORTRAIT OF ARTIST’S WIFE (Grace), 1947 egg tempera on gessoed masonite 20 x 16 inches Estate of the Artist

SAILORS’ REUNION (Victoria), 1943 egg tempera on gessoed masonite 23 x 27 inches Estate of the Artist

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An Original Printmaker Smith’s decision to become a printmaker in 1948 was a practical one; based on the fact that his day job in the Post Office – first in Chilliwack and then in Red Deer – allowed him only so much time to pursue his art. To paint properly required daylight and the ability to work for many hours uninterrupted. Living as he did in Red Deer with his family in a two bedroom apartment with no studio meant that as a printmaker he could still come back to the task at hand. The work was still time-consuming but it could also be done on a smaller scale. As for the actual printing of the engraved or wood-cut image, Smith handprinted all of his images until 1955 when a small Proof Press (13 x 27 bed) was purchased from Vandercook & Sons of Chicago. Grace was also always on hand to assist with this task.

The overwhelming majority of prints Smith made were engravings, a historically important method of producing images on paper utilized by artists and those involved in the commercial reproduction of illustrations for books and magazines. By the time he adopted the technique, engraving had largely fallen out of use. But not for Smith who, with his love for drawing, viewed the technique as “merely a more difficult form of drawing, where no corrections can be made.”11 Artists he studied and sought inspiration from included France’s Gustave Doré, Ireland’s Robert Gibbings and England’s Augustus John and Eric Gill. He was also reported to be very fond of the graphic works and illustrations of American artists Lynd Ward, Antonio Frasconi and Leonard Baskin.12 Today, former Red Deer College art instructor and printmaker, Jim Westergard, regards Smith’s focus on engraving to be still an uncommon practice. He can also remember how secretive he was himself about his own engravings because as a young art student the technique was considered so old-school. He regrets never meeting the pioneering Red Deer Greg Neiman. “It’s the spirit of the Prairies”, The Red Deer Advocate, Red Deer AB (May 21, 1977).

12 Exhibition brochure, “James Agrell Smith – Wood Engravings”. Peter Whyte Gallery, November 1November 30, 1971.

SELF, 1945 oil on canvas board 14 x 9 ½ inches Estate of the Artist

artist but always admired the ‘starkness and power’13 of Smith’s prints where the medium was very much the message. A message expressed through the intricately engraved lines on a block of end-grain maple that when later printed produced the white lines on the handmade paper Smith ordered from Japan.

Westergard observes Smith had no formula for making his marks and lines: choosing instead, to let each designed image dictate each stroke of the sharp engraving tool or burin. “You have it thought out before and the tool does the talking.”14 In addition, many of the depicted subjects are featured with

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13 14

Interview with Jim Westergard, February 15, 2013, Red Deer AB. Interview with James Agrell Smith, ibid. p.3

SELF-PORTRAIT, 1964 Sumi ink on paper 22 ½ x 30 inches Collection of Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton AB, 75.2

little or no background and, in most cases, no attempt was made by the artist to create a scene or vignette. Westergard considers this type of portrayal to be a modern one despite Smith’s regional subject matter with its links to Social Realism of the 1930s when artists drew attention to the lives of working people.

In that regard, Smith clearly responded to that period when he stated: “I’m not contemporary at all…I became interested in art at the time when naturalism or whatever it is, was prevalent in the Thirties…and so I stayed there.”15 But not, it should be said, without bringing his own distinctive textures, heavy outlines and “use of cross-hatching, stippling and broad jagged cuts, often repeated for effect.”16 Applied with energy and precision, the engraved faces, hands and clothing of Smith’s subjects are unlike those of any of his peers in Canadian printmaking. It is one 15 16

Interview with James Agrell Smith, ibid. p.5-6.

From profile of James Agrell Smith on Willock and Sax Gallery website.

aspect of his graphic art which makes a James Agrell Smith print so identifiable.

Inspired by the dozens of sketches the artist made, when time permitted, of people coming into the post office; their faces are lined and worn. The clothing they wear often heavy and oppressive. Sometimes as images, they are composites with the clothing of one subject transposed to the face of another.

More significantly, the stark reality of prairie life as Smith interprets it is not always a comfortable or prosperous one. The only time there is lightness in the air is when the artist occasionally turns to the subject of children as in The Nest (1955) and Boy with a Book (1952) featuring his son, Ken. Whatever the age of the subject, though, all are anonymous.

Titled as succinctly as possible with names like: Two Indians (1950); Three Men (1953); The Man From Big Stone (1955); Portrait of a Poet (1956); The Goose Hunter (1957) and so on.

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THE NEST, 1955 wood engraving, 9/50 8 x 6 inches Collection of Red Deer Museum + Art Gallery, 1987.157.14

The majority of recorded prints Smith produced were made in the 1950s with his last work, Reflection on a Great Grandfather, dated 1972. In 1955, the artist had the honour of a oneperson exhibition at the University of Toronto’s Hart House. Featured among the cultural centre’s own collection of Group of Seven paintings with their passionate regard for the Canadian landscape was Smith’s own deep sense of place reflected in the local and the figurative.

In all, thirteen engravings were shown including several works now on display in A Broader Picture.

Present at Hart House was the prize-winning, Cariboo Cowboy as was Portrait of a Grandmother (1955) and Two Chinamen (1953) where distilled in these prints and others is the character of the individuals and to some extent the nature of their occupation. “All faces, for instance, have personality, but not all faces have character,17” observed Smith

BOY WITH A BOOK, 1952 wood engraving, 28/50 8 x 6 inches Private Collection

in describing what attracted him to certain people. Nonetheless, according to an early collector of Smith’s work, Yvonne Johnson, the artist was “not a people-person and yet he focused on people.”18 While Morris Flewwelling, another early supporter and collector, believes the rugged character of many of his subjects were a reflection of the fact that “he liked the landscape of the figure.”19 In the 1950s and 1960s, Smith actively participated in many group exhibitions largely in Ontario. During that time, his work was also represented in the Northwest Printmakers International Exhibitions (Seattle, 1962 and Portland, 1966); the Centennial Print Exhibition (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1967) and the Expo Habitat Exhibition (Expo 67, Montreal, 1967). The latter two exhibitions were arranged 18

17 Ken Liddell. “Furrows and Foothills”, The Calgary Herald, Calgary AB (November 26, 1954).

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Interview with Yvonne Johnson, November 29, 2012, Red Deer AB. 19 Interview with Morris Flewwelling, November 29, 2012, Red Deer AB.

TWO INDIANS, 1950 wood engraving, 23/50 7 ¾ X 4 ¾ inches Collection of Red Deer Museum + Art Gallery, 1987.157.12

by the Society of Canadian Painter-Etchers and Engravers (CPE), an organization important to Smith. It was through the Society that Smith was first able to show his prints regularly and become acquainted with others like Edmonton’s George Weber (1907-2002).

THE MAN FROM BIG STONE, 1955 wood engraving, 19/50 8 x 6 inches Collection of Red Deer Museum + Art Gallery, 1987.157.9

Alberta Takes Heed of Smith

A good friend of Smith’s, Weber was a master printer in his own right; playing a seminal role in the development of serigraph (silkscreen) printmaking in the province. He established the Edmonton branch of the CPE in 1954 and a few years later organized the Western Print Exhibit for Toronto’s Hart House. Smith’s engraving, The Goose Hunter (1957) and Boy with a Fiddle (1957) – one of two woodcuts in A Broader Picture – were part of this significant and early exhibition of western Canadian graphic works20.

Remarkably, in his own homeland, the name of James Agrell Smith was nowhere to be seen in exhibition until nearly the end of the 1960s with a showing at Edmonton’s Canadiana Galleries. This was followed in 1970 with tour of his prints by the province’s Cultural Development Branch. Both marked an important debut for the artist but this time in his own province. By then, the chapter on Smith’s practice as one of the country’s most brilliant engravers was nearing its end and although his work had been acquired by institutions like the Glenbow Foundation (1957), Red Deer Public Library (1967), University of Lethbridge (1968) and the Alberta Art Foundation (1973), the artist was only beginning to exhibit in Alberta!

20 Bente Roed Cochran. Printmaking in Alberta 1945-1985, The University of Alberta Press (Edmonton AB, 1989), p.146

Represented in the 1970 tour were largely engravings of the 1950s and two more recent additions –the haunting Fencepost (1965) A Broader Picture: Drawings, Paintings and Original Prints

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THREE MEN, 1953 wood engraving, 38/50 4 ¾ x 7 ¾inches Collection of Red Deer Museum + Art Gallery, 1987.157.13

PORTRAIT OF A POET, 1956 wood engraving, 38/50 8 x 6 inches Private Collection

,and Danse Macabre (1966). Smith always contended he worked a lot from memory, even “from eons before”21, which today provides a context for their unique and disturbing subject matter. In one image, at the top of the fencepost is the nailed carcass of a coyote while in Danse Macabre (1966), two dead owls hang from a barbed wire fence. About the latter work in which the owls’ dense mass of feathers dominate the woodcut image, Smith told the Red Deer newspaper:

TWO CHINAMEN, 1953 wood engraving, 25/50 5 ¾x 3 ¾ inches Collection of Red Deer Museum + Art Gallery , 1987.157.5

You’d be surprised how many people scold me because they say the pictures I do of the prairies are ugly.

Well, I don’t agree with that. I think the prairies have their own kind of beauty. And not everything in life is beautiful; I don’t believe it should be painted dishonestly.

21 Interview with James Agrell Smith, ibid. p.7

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PORTRAIT OF A GRANDMOTHER, 1955 wood engraving 8 x 6 inches Collection of Red Deer Museum + Art Gallery, 1987.157.10

I can remember when I was a small boy, the sight I once saw –two owls hanging dead from a barbed wire fence. That memory has stayed with me for all this time, so I made a print of it…it’s really just a picture of the way prairie life is sometimes.22 In a Broader Picture, both prints are featured and a dry-brush watercolour and a charcoal on paper of Fencepost. Together, these three images of Fencepost are a striking trio; a testament to Smith’s skills in several media and his own tenacious belief in artistic integrity. All three were created in 1965, a year after his retirement from the Red Deer Post Office. Notably, unlike the engravings of the 1950s, the realism of his post-retirement work will have a more contemporary demeanor.

22 Lynne Van Luven. “Artist J.A. Smith depicts prairie images in paintings, woodcuts.” The Red Deer Advocate, Red Deer AB (November 5, 1970).

REFLECTION ON A GREAT-GRANDFATHER, 1972 wood engraving 8 x 6 inches Collection of Red Deer Museum + Art Gallery, 1987.157.8

A Banff Interlude By the early 1970s, he and Grace had moved to Banff, Alberta. There Smith had the novelty of being able to work in his own studio thanks to painter, cultural philanthropist and property owner, Catherine Whyte (19061979) who gave the couple an affordable place to live. Nephew and poet, Jon Whyte, also became a good friend and as Rondo Wood remembered it, ‘a kindred spirit’.23 Although the Smiths were only in the mountain town for four years before returning to Red Deer, the town with its more cosmopolitan character was a welcome change.

The artist felt he was in a community that respected what he did as ‘a way of life’ and was even able to acknowledge his contribution.

23 Interview with Rondo Wood, February 14, 2013, Red Deer AB.

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BOY WITH A FIDDLE, 1957 woodcut 14 ½ x 11 inches Estate of the Artist

One of those was Roger Boulet who was 28 years old when he met Smith in Banff. Now a veteran curator and author, Boulet observed: His art was all auto-biographical. I think he was always trying to come to terms with his life, the war, and postwar... Like a lot of western Canadian artists, he was subscribed to some periodicals, and kept in touch with artists he knew through correspondents.

Face to face visits were few and far between, and he always looked forward to visits from people with whom he could talk about art, and get some feedback about his own work. As he became aware of the larger world out there, I think he realized he preferred his own world... but he certainly loved looking at books on the Masters, like Rembrandt and Durer for instance... I don’t think he ever really connected with modernism (i.e., abstract art) as it emerged in Canada after the war, and in the manner that it was tirelessly promoted by Arts Canada.24 24 E-mail to author dated June 13, 2013.

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FENCEPOST, 1965 engraving 20 x 16 inches Estate of the Artist

In 1971, the Peter Whyte Gallery hosted Graven Image, an exhibit of eighteen prints where visitors were introduced to Smith’s approach to engraving which “gives the end product a certain vitality. There is a ‘grit’ and ‘bite’ in each work of art; with the absence of colour, his subject takes on a harsh realness.”25 More exhibitions would soon follow including one in 1973 at the new Red Deer and District Museum and a travelling exhibit mounted by Calgary’s Glenbow-Alberta Institute, 1973-1974.

While in Banff, Smith made a few more prints; painted and drew Grace (a beloved subject) 25 Exhibition pamphlet dated 1971.

FENCEPOST, 1965 charcoal on paper 25 x 19 ½ inches Estate of the Artist

FENCEPOST, 1965 drybrush watercolour 30 x 22 ½ inches Estate of the Artist

and worked on a long-time dream of creating a limited-edition block-print book illustrated with his own engravings to be titled, Yet Seen Too Oft. This told the visual story of a boy and his pet crow in rural small town where the crow introduces him to characters personifying the Seven Deadly Sins. The project proved too costly but the artist, who had always had a keen interest in literature and poetry, did create some of the book’s illustrations; a few which appeared in Graven Image.

To Stettler Again Among the Rockies where western Canadian landscape art had begun in such a grand manner, it would have been easy to understand if Smith had painted a few canvases of mountain scenery. But not this artist who, instead, was stirred by childhood memories to paint March Wind (1972), this superb drybrush watercolour features in the immediate foreground a tiny lone slough in a bleak prairie landscape. The snow and ice are gone but the wind is palpable as it stirs the slough’s water and surrounding dry grass. Imbued with a deep silence, this rare landscape, in my opinion, perhaps speaks about the intense isolation the A Broader Picture: Drawings, Paintings and Original Prints

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artist once felt in a small frontier town where he “had to keep defending the fact that you wanted to draw and paint.”26 Smith would return to the theme of central Alberta again, this time in a late oil on canvas titled The Revenant (Self at Stettler), (1984).

Here the gray-haired artist stands calmly frontand-centre with the town water tower and grain elevators in the background. Like March Wind and other paintings and works on paper selected for A Broader Picture, this work exemplifies the role he saw for himself when describing himself as: “… a mood-worker. I see moods, I see poetic images. I think I see images which are removed and this is what I try to interpret.”27 Painted in 1984, four years before his death, The Revenant, French for ‘ghost’, ‘spirit’, or more specifically ‘one who returns’ signifies perhaps how James Agrell Smith’s own valiant artistic spirit prevailed over the circumstances of his life. In doing so, the artist left his country with a unique and accomplished legacy in paintings, works on paper and original prints.

DANSE MACABRE, 1966 woodcut print 26 x 18 inches Private Collection

26 Interview with James Agrell Smith, ibid. p.11.

27 Interview with James Agrell Smith, ibid. p.7-8.

MARCH WIND, 1972 drybrush watercolour 22 x 31 inches Estate of the Artist

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UNTITLED (Artist’s Wife, Grace) 1972 oil on canvas 30 x 40 inches Estate of the Artists

THE REVENANT (Self at Stettler), 1984 oil on canvas 20 x 24 inches Estate of the Artist

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Mary-Beth Laviolette Mary-Beth Laviolette is an independent curator, art writer and public speaker.

Since 1982, the Edmonton-born writer has worked extensively in the visual arts. She is the author of An Alberta Art Chronicle: Adventures in Recent and Contemporary Art (2005) and is the co-author of Alberta Art and Artists: An Overview (2007). In addition, as a writer/broadcaster she spent fifteen years with CBC Radio in Ottawa, Toronto & Calgary covering the arts.

She has curated several exhibitions for public art galleries in Alberta and has written reviews and other material for the Calgary Herald, Canadian Art, GalleriesWest, Studio and other publications. One of her most recent exhibitions, Alberta Mistresses of the Modern: 1935-1975 was displayed at the Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton) in 2012. In 2013, she curated a large survey of 1960’s art in Calgary for the Glenbow Museum. In addition, last year her third book, A Delicate Art: Artists, Wildflowers and Native Plants of the West was published.

Acknowledgments I wish to acknowledge Ken & Heather Agrell-Smith who, in addition to providing a substantial loan of works to A Broader Picture, also enriched the story of the artist’s life and work with their recollections. The same may be said about Yvonne Johnson of Red Deer. Many thanks are also owed to Morris Flewwelling, Rondo Wood, Jim Westergard, Roger Boulet (Penticton, B.C.) as well as Valerie Miller of the Red Deer Museum + Art Gallery who provided support.

Loans were also provided by the Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton); Red Deer Public Library; Glenbow Museum (Calgary) and the Red Deer Museum + Art Gallery. Finally, an immeasurable amount of excellent research was provided by Mary-Jane Laviolette (Edmonton). 

Mary-Beth Laviolette, June 2013

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