A visionary and experimental artist, Falk’s 60-year career covers a wide range of art forms including video, sculpture, ceramics, painting and performance. She is considered one of Canada’s most important living artists.

Above and below: Installation views of the retrospective Gathie Falk: Revelations, a travelling exhibition at the Audain Museum in Whistler, BC until May 6, 2024.

Falk has defined her work as a “veneration of the ordinary,” the witty and whimsical treatment of the common objects of everyday life.

Her work reflects childhood memories

Falk refers fondly to the close-knit Mennonite village in Manitoba where her family settled. Her parents were German-speaking Mennonites who fled Russia for Canada two years before Falk was born in 1928.

Falk has memories of fields of juicy, red watermelons, the fragility and economy of eggs, her mother’s gardens, piles of fresh fruit from the neighbour’s cherry tree, homemade shoes and dresses, a colourful Parcheesi game board with mesmerizing illustrations of rural scenes.

Falk’s 2018 memoir (Apples etc.) paints an idyllic childhood filled with joy — despite poverty, the loss of her father, and frequent moves. It was her imagination which filled her early years and propelled so much of her later art, including performances such as Red Angel (above).

The work 196 Apples, 1969–70, is one of the most admired and recognizable of Falk’s creations. Each ceramic fruit is individually handcrafted and slightly different than the next. Together they are carefully arranged into a glistening red pyramid, like one we might encounter in a grocery store. Falk made more than two dozen of these “Fruit Piles,” and the series can now be found in public and private collections across the country and around the world.

–Art Canada Institute (free, bilingual downloadable book about Gathie Falk)

Everyday objects inspire Falk

Falk also paints extensively. Embracing the simplicity of everyday objects, Falk encourages audiences to see the world with curiosity and wonder.

Explore More About Gathie Falk

The Art Canada Institute’s free, downloadable e-book about Gathie Falk, here.

An interview with the National Gallery of Canada, here.

An overview of the Revelations exhibition at the Audain Art Museum here.

At the McMichael, which curated Gathie Falk’s exhibition , then sent it travelling, here.

Gathie Falk’s artist page at Equinox Gallery

This is No. 63 in 150 Artists, an ongoing series on Canadian artists you should know.

Lemieux is well recognized for his paintings of the desolate, seemingly infinite spaces of the landscapes of Quebec, the National Gallery of Canada notes. “Many of his works are permeated with an intense feeling of mystery.”

The minimalist style of his monochromatic landscapes and portraits are uniquely Lemieux’s.

The solitude we all have to live with

I paint because I like to paint. I have no theories. In my landscapes and my characters I try to express the solitude we all have to live with, and in each painting, the inner world of my memories. My external surroundings only interest me because they allow me to paint my inner world.

jean paul lemieux

Lemieux studied at the Montreal School of Fine Arts from 1926 to 1929, where he demonstrated a talent for illustration – later in life illustrating several books including a new edition of the iconic Québécois novel Maria Chapdelaine (above, 1981). He spent a year in Paris, returned to Montreal for a teaching diploma, and taught from 1937 to 1967 at the École des Beaux-Arts in Québec.

A formative experience at 10

In 1914, when Lemieux was 10, he had a formative experience during one of the summers his family spent at Kent House, a resort outside Québec City at Montmorency Falls. An American artist was creating large paintings for one of the hotel’s lodges. This prompted Lemieux to start making sketches, and to paint his first watercolour.

The painting 1910 Remembered (one of his most recognizable) recalls those summer days at Kent House. It’s one of the autobiographical paintings that marked Lemieux’s classic period (1956 to 1970). Another is Summer of 1914, done in 1965, below.

In the 1930s, Lemieux was inspired by the rural and picturesque landscapes of Charlevoix and the Eastern Townships. By the 40s he was into popular art, notably in the painting Our Lady Protecting Québec (1942), and large compositions like La Fête-Dieu à Québec (1944) below.

From the 1950s, along with Les Ursulines (1951) (below), Lemieux began to simplify his style, painting static scenes composed of a bare space on which shapes and characters stand out. Subsequently, he produced several notable paintings such as The Evening Visitor (1956) and Midday Train (1956).

He was recognized internationally

From Lemieux’s first major honor (Quebec’s top art prize for his 1951 painting (Les Ursulines) his reputation grew. Through the 1960s, he had solo exhibitions in Vancouver, Toronto, Montréal, and Québec City, and was part of four biennial exhibitions at the National Gallery of Canada.

His work was also exhibited at the Bienal of Sao Paulo, the Brussels International Exposition, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Musée Galliera in Paris. He represented Canada at the 1960 Venice Biennale and in 1968, became a Companion of the Order of Canada.

He painted until his death at 86

Lemieux continued to paint until his death at age 86 in 1990, including this commission from the Government of Canada (above). At the time of the unveiling in 1979, Lemieux explained that the flat, blunt style was a deliberate decision to distance the work from formal royal portraiture and to give it a distinctively Canadian character.

A popular retrospective of his work, Silence and Space, was held in 2022 at Le Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, here. Many of his most striking, austere, monochromatic works were included (La Visite des Dames), above.

The artist’s austerity wasn’t cold-hearted. His horizontal vistas always contained at least a hint of humanity: a misty train, a snow-blurred structure, a fence. He was credited by at least one critic for reintroducing the figure into the Canadian landscape.

Anita Lahey, 2020, National Gallery of Canada magazine, here.

Read More About Jean Paul Lemieux

The Art Canada Institute’s fascinating online book on Jean-Paul Lemieux here.

A short National Gallery of Canada article that explore’s his style, here.

The Canadian Encyclopedia, here.

Browse More Works by Jean Paul Lemieux

The Lemieux collection at Le Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, here.

At Mutual Art, here.

At artnet, here.

This is No. 62 in 150 Artists, an ongoing series on Canadian artists you should know.

Ned Pratt is an award winning Newfoundland photographer with an innate understanding of the province’s beautiful but harsh landscape, which creates a foundation for his minimal, striking photographs.

Pratt’s playful use of perspective and vantage point transforms photographs of familiar landmarks into elegant abstractions.

The son of celebrated Canadian painters Christopher Pratt and Mary Pratt, he crafts spare, abstract photographs.

“There were always books about the history of art and different artists neatly stacked on shelves in our home… Work I considered abstract interested me the most – the work of Piet Mondrian and Marc Chagall, in particular.”

Ned Pratt

Drawn to the solitude of photography

Pratt was drawn to the solitude of photography, but the medium also represented, in his words, “a road that led away, at least technically,” from his parents’ painting practices. The clean lines and spare compositions that mark Ned’s work show the influence of his father’s canvases—and his way of seeing the world.

Ned Pratt  has over 25 years experience in corporate and commercial photography, photojournalism and photo illustration.

Pratt holds a BFA in photography from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and a BA in art history from Acadia University. His photography has been exhibited at the former Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, PREFIX Photo, the Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival (2012) and in Oh, Canada: Contemporary Art from North America at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

Image at top of post: Yellow Store at Red Cliffe, Pigment inkjet print on Kodak Professional Photo paper, 33 × 46.25, 2023, via Christina Parker Gallery, here.

Explore more of the works at these links:

Ned Pratt’s website, here.

His latest exhibition (2023) here.

At Christina Parker gallery, here.

At Nicholas Metivier gallery, here.

This is No. 61 in 150 Artists, an ongoing series on Canadian artists you should know.

The Inuit printmaker was a national treasure who died in 2013. Kenouak was born in an igloo on the southern coast of Baffin Island in 1927, and is considered one of Canada’s most influential artists.

The Enchanted Owl, a colour stonecut on laid paper, is one of her most recognized works and one of the most enduring and iconic images in Canadian art ( see the video above and on YouTube here.)   It is one of my own favourites and is the logo for Canadian Art Junkie, on the title banner above.

30 Ways to Describe an Owl

Kenojuak’s snowy owls and other Arctic birds are legendary. Scroll through this Inuit Art Foundation list of “30 Ways to Describe an Owl, according to Kenojuak Ashevak“ She rendered the feathers of these birds in elongated and curved lines which radiate outwards with a sense of frenetic energy.

As an early participant in the first Inuit printmaking program, set up by James Houston in Cape Dorset in the late 1950s, Kenoujuak helped define a new aesthetic language with her drawings and prints. Some of her never-before-seen prints in stonecut, lithography and etching are on exhibition through April at Beaverbrook gallery in New Brunswick (here)

In 2004 Kenojuak designed a window for the chapel of Appleby College in Oakville, the first stained glass window ever designed by an Inuit artist (more here) . Titled Iggalaaq (Where the Light Comes Through), the window portrays a large, snowy owl and an arctic char — both symbols of Canada’s north.

Her stylized prints featuring birds, fish, humans, and other animals are perhaps most widely recognized for their presence on postage stamps and currency. But Kenojuak’s intense and imaginative visual language originates in larger-scale drawings, as well as soapstone carvings and textiles.

She is the matriarch of the modern Inuit art movement – exemplifying incredible skill and creativity of the movement based out of Kinngait — formerly Cape Dorset — that Kenojuak helped found.

The nationally touring exhibition of her work through April at the Beaverbrook gallery includes drawings, from the archives of the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative, which inspired some of Kenojuak’s most emblematic prints. (Above, video of the catalog)

Nearly every Cape Dorset Annual Print Release since 1959 and until her death in 2013, has featured work by Kenojuak. Her images have been exhibited throughout Canada, United States, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Sweden, South Korea and Japan among other countries. Her work is in numerous public and private collections internationally.

Dorset Fine Arts / Kenojuak Ashevak, here

At the National Gallery of Canada, here.

Travelling exhibition site, here.

Heritage Minute (video) on CBC, here.

This is No. 60 in 150 Artists, an ongoing series on Canadian artists you should know.