Petro Lopata

Kureleks Canada is the title of an exhibit at Torontos Ukrainian Canadian Art Foundation (UCAF) on display November 2-15. Curated by Christina Stodilka-Curkowskyj, the show brings together thirty works from private collections and over twenty other samples of William Kureleks paintings, drawings and prints.

Presented jointly by a committee comprised of UCAF directors and members of the Toronto branch of the Ukrainian Canadian Professional and Business Association, the show marks the 25th anniversary of the Ukrainian Canadian masters death.

Kurelek is a household name among Ukrainians across this country. And its been that way for a while, even during the artists life. He lived at various times in Whitford, Alberta, where he was born in 1927; Stonewall, Manitoba; Toronto, Ontario, where he died of cancer in 1977; and travelled across the country, exhibiting, at times in school gymnasiums. Now, grade school students are coming to visit his artwork, ensuring that Kureleks legacy will be a lasting one.

When this paper was visiting the UCAF on November 6, over sixty arrived from Cardinal Josyf Slipyj School in Torontos west end. Educators Halia Dmytryshyn and Marika Szkambara led the students on an interactive tour of Kureleks work and life. Szkambara, who was elected president of the World Federation of Ukrainian Womens Organizations last month, estimated some 350 school students would be attending the exhibit over the next few days.

The show opened last Saturday evening with a gala champagne reception attended by 220 art-goers. UCPBA Toronto president Roman Nazarewycz told the New Pathway that over $100,000 in sales were generated that evening. For $35,000, one anonymous buyer will walk away with the shows highest-priced painting, a large 1975 mixed media work titled Far away fields look green (field series). According to Nazarewycz, The Ukrainian Canadian business community supported the project to the fullest.

Jean Kurelek, Williams widow, was present at the opening, said Nazarewycz. She thanked everyone present for their tremendous response to her husbands memory.

A majority of the work on display is from private collections. Theyre rarely seen or published. Nazarewycz told the New Pathway much of the credit in negotiating the loans lies with Stodilka-Curkowskyj.

The local curator has conveniently arranged the art into small groupings of works linked by common theme, style or period. Ranging from an early 1950 drawing to a pair of oils and some prints from 1976, the exhibit demonstrates with intimate, small- to mid-size works that Kureleks passions and demons were many and varied.

Paintings like Saskatoon jam, from 1977, or Ukrainian Pioneer stove which the artist painted in 1974, depict traditional Ukrainian Canadian household scenes with startling clarity and brightness.

Some, like a 1973 painting, Portrait of the artist a a young child, bear embroidered bands, which he incorporated in his often hand-built frames. This feature one he appropriated from mass Ukrainian culture is unique to Kurelek among other name-brand, top-ranking international artists.

Kurelek painted himself as a diaper-wearing toddler. With a striking half-smile not unlike the Mona Lisas, he emerges from a dark interior out a door to face the viewer, gripping the tail of an upside-down kitten.

The work is very honest for any artist and represents a portent of Kureleks troubled future in hind-sight. Kurelek was open about his depression, for which he received treatment, living at a hospital in London, England in the 1950s.

Though only available as a print at the UCAF show, Newfie Jokes demonstates that the artist occasionally loved a good laugh. The painting records, in what appears to be a typical coastal Newfoundland scene, a number of anecdotes along the lines of the paintings title. The original, interestingly, replaces the Ukrainian embroidery in the framing for a continuous frieze of hand-scribbled jokes about the Eastern Canadians.

However, Kurelek felt most strongly about his religious art, like the 1975 painting Across the river from Capital. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1957, following a nervous breakdown.

In his autobiography Someone With Me, published in 1973, the artist wrote that in the context of societys continued moral decline it would be dishonest for me to produce art for arts sake, thus defending his didactic or moralizing art.

Works like Drugs (Temptation in The Desert) and Our liberated news vendors show Kurelek in the role of artist as social critic. He realized that with these troubling paintings, some viewers might consider him in the wrong line of work. But Kurelek responded, that if God had meant me to do strictly that [preach], then Hed not have given me the talent to paint and draw.