1. William Kurelek's work was influenced by his childhood on the prairies, his Ukrainian-Canadian roots, his struggles with mental illness, and his conversion to Roman Catholicism.
36 Facts About William Kurelek
1. 2.
William Kurelek was born near Whitford, Alberta in 1927, the oldest of seven children in a Ukrainian immigrant family: Bill, John, Winn, Nancy, Sandy, Paul, and Iris.
3.
William Kurelek's father, Dmytro Kurelek, was born in Boriwtsi, Bukovina.
4.
William Kurelek's family had come with the first wave of Ukrainian immigration to Canada and was from Boriwtsi.
5.
William Kurelek's family lost their grain farm during the Great Depression and moved to a six-hundred-acre former dairy farm near Stonewall, Manitoba, around 1933.
6.
William Kurelek was at the top of his class in German, and did well in all the other subjects.
7.
William Kurelek graduated from high school in 1946, and enrolled in the fall of that year in the Arts General Course at the University of Manitoba, graduating with his degree in May 1949.
8.
William Kurelek had developed an early interest in art, which was not encouraged by his hard-working parents.
9.
Zaporozhian Cossacks, a gift to his father, is the last painting William Kurelek did before leaving for Europe for the first time, and shows the influence of the Mexican muralists on his work.
10.
William Kurelek took a correspondence course from the church, and met with Father Edward Holloway, a theologian trained at the English College in Rome, who helped him over some final stumbling blocks.
11.
In February 1957, William Kurelek entered the Roman Catholic Church by a ceremony of conditional baptism.
12.
William Kurelek was transferred from the Maudsley to the Netherne Hospital, where he stayed from November 1953 to January 1955, to work with Edward Adamson, a pioneer of art therapy.
13.
In later years, Avrom Isaacs commented that William Kurelek would take more time building a frame than actually painting its canvas.
14.
Isaacs became William Kurelek's agent for life; it was a business arrangement that remained unwritten.
15.
William Kurelek had a reddish complexion and looked like a lumberjack; he looked as if he were in the wrong country, the wrong century, the wrong situation.
16.
William Kurelek first visited the Catholic Information Centre at Bathurst and Bloor streets in Toronto in November 1959.
17.
William Kurelek soon found himself attending twice a week, helping out on one of its committees.
18.
William Kurelek titled a painting of his wife which he did the year they were married: Mendelssohn in Canadian Winter, as she enjoyed listening to Mendelssohn's violin concerto very much.
19.
William Kurelek's marriage was swiftly fruitful, with three children born by 1966.
20.
Alongside his didactic paintings, William Kurelek was continuing with his more conventional ones.
21.
William Kurelek's painting Manitoba Party is at the beginning of this period.
22.
William Kurelek titled his series: "Ukrainian Woman Pioneer in Canada".
23.
Originally Ukrainian Orthodox, and briefly a professed atheist, William Kurelek, converted to the Roman Catholic Church in 1957, by 1959 had started on his St Matthew's Passion series, 160 paintings on the Passion of Christ.
24.
William Kurelek went along, and was allowed by the Soviet authorities to visit his father's village, see the house where his father was born, and spend four brief hours with his relatives.
25.
William Kurelek won the Amelia Frances Howard-Gibbon Illustrator's Award for A Prairie Boy's Winter in 1974 and A Prairie Boy's Summer in 1976.
26.
In 1973 at a conference on ethnic studies in Toronto, William Kurelek met Abe Arnold who became his collaborator on the book Jewish Life in Canada.
27.
William Kurelek went on to do an Inuit series, travelling in Oct 1975 to Pangnirtung in the Northwest Territories at that time, today Nunavut.
28.
William Kurelek did a series of 20 paintings depicting the Nativity as if Christ had been born in various Canadian settings: an igloo, a trapper's cabin, a boxcar, a motel.
29.
William Kurelek maintained a cottage near Combermere, Ontario, where he got his inspiration for a book of paintings entitled The Polish Canadians, and was a friend of the nearby Madonna House Apostolate.
30.
William Kurelek hitchhiked from Canada to Mexico in 1950 and the Instituto Allende in San Miguel.
31.
William Kurelek went to Vienna, behind the Iron Curtain, and saw the eight large Brueghels on display at the Kunsthistorisches Museum.
32.
William Kurelek held up the publication of the book and it was only published posthumously.
33.
William Kurelek completed 15 paintings to illustrate it, and then had second thoughts.
34.
In January 1976, William Kurelek painted the mural at the St Thomas More College Chapel in Saskatoon.
35.
William Kurelek was made a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.
36.
In 1981, the hard rock band Van Halen released their fourth album titled "Fair Warning", with a cover that features several closeup details of William Kurelek's painting "The Maze" from 1953.