
This Montreal
painter is essentially self-taught, but worked from time to time with
Frederick Horsman Varley and Louis Muhlstock. For a few summers during
the early 1940s, he worked as a deckhand on cargo boats plying the Great
Lakes. In 1943, the National Gallery of Canada commissioned him to
depict the activities of the Merchant Navy and he left on a mission to
the Caribbean with Michael Forster.
He enlisted in the
Royal Canadian Navy in February 1944 and worked as an official war
artist from April 1944 to August 1945. Most of his works depict the
landing operations at Normandy and destroyer movements off Brest.
He obtained a
Guggenheim fellowship that allowed him to travel and paint in United
States in 1947 and 1948. He taught at the Vancouver School of Art in
1948. He won a prize at the Second International Exhibition of Drawing
and Engraving in Lugano, Switzerland in 1952. His lithographs were
exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1958. He lives in Toronto.
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