en-ca SC0209-KWI-TX-1

en-ca Newnham - Building B - Level 2 - Library

en-ca William Kurelek (b. 1927-1977)

en-ca Pumping Water

en-ca 1976

en-ca Textile

en-ca Woven Tapestry

en-ca 227.5 x 127.5 cm

en-ca 19/25

en-ca In 1975, Fay Loeb, in recognition that many of Canada’s commercial and public buildings were cold and stark, calculated that artist-designed tapestries would bring life as well as visual and physical warmth to these austere spaces. The cost would not be prohibitive and the tapestry would be resistant to damage.

In 1976, 23 Canadian artists and sculptors were each invited to submit preliminary drawings for a tapestry in an edition of 25. (David Phillips, Seneca Polytechnic)

en-ca Kurelek’s art resembles Brueghel’s, not only in certain actual shapes (the lumpy outlines of the human beings, for instance) but also in its obsession with human activity. Kurelek is anxious to convey intensely the feelings involved in work and play, especially work. To Kurelek the landscape is, fundamentally, a place in which men and boys must do hard work. He shows them hauling sheaves to the threshing machine, fighting a barn fire, cutting away pieces of snow-crusted haystack, dynamiting a log jam. He also shows them at play: fishing, making toy water wheels during the spring thaw, making whistles out of dogwood branches.

He is surely joking when he insists that these are only illustrations. They are, quite consciously, art objects, intended to evoke certain feelings through the manipulation of artistic techniques. The techniques are oddly mixed: the general composition is usually quite formal, obeying the best art-school rules, but the details are often handled in a way that suggests primitive art. The faces have a primitive quality, as if whittled out of wood in a spare moment. Sometimes they are strangely misplaced, like those of the boys in "Dogwood Whistle." They look like the faces of middle-aged men.

en-ca Purchased at auction from Heffel

en-ca Concordia

en-ca Signed on the bottom, WK 76

Seneca Art