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]