William
Kurelek was the oldest of seven children born to a Ukrainian father who
had immigrated to the prairie provinces from the village of Boriwtsi, Province
of Bukovina, western Ukraine, 1924. Shortly after he arrived, he married
a Canadian girl whose parents earlier had come to Canada from the same
Ukrainian town. Born in a shack near Whitford, Alberta, 1927, William Kurelek
not only experienced the hardships of growing up in a pioneering prairie
settlement but the devastation of poverty brought on by the GreatDepression
of the 1930s. Wishing to be an artist, he studied art in Winnipeg, Toronto,
and Mexico. By the 1960s, he was an established, well known, and much respected
artist living in Toronto. His earlier works, artistically narrative, depict
sophisticated folk art scenes drawn from his prairie days and Ukrainian
heritage. Because of his conversion to Roman Catholicism, his latter paintings
enter a social-realism phase spotlighting mankind’s original sin. This
self-portrait of William Kurelek, completed a few years before his death,
1977, suggests characteristics of determination, concentration, and aggressive
pensiveness, all of which are traits which have thrust him on the artistic
stage as one of Canada’s great triumphs in the world of canvas and brushstroke.
[Photo, courtesy Jean Kurelek]