Sold for: $73,250

PROVENANCE
The Isaacs Gallery Ltd., Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto

LITERATURE
William Kurelek, Kurelek’s Canada, 1975, page 12
William Kurelek, interview by Michael Ewanchuk, circa 1975, excerpt “I really fell in love with nature,” University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections, available at https://kurelek.ca/audio-video/audio

In 1934, the Kurelek family left their homestead in Whitford, Alberta, and resettled on a farm some 40 kilometres north of Winnipeg in Stonewall, Manitoba. Their attempts to grow wheat there met with failure, and William’s father, Dmytro, like many of his immigrant neighbours, began raising dairy cattle instead. The new property was ideal for grazing, as it backed onto a large stretch of swampy wetlands to the east—today called Oak Hammock Marsh, then known as St. Andrews Bog, and to the Kureleks, as simply “the bog.”

Kurelek would speak about how much he enjoyed that “great, free, flat bogland” while he was growing up, in particular how it represented an escape from the chores and demands of field work. He stated:

I was really taken by nature. I like birds, and I like to explore, take the measure of water in the spring in my rubber boots. I loved the big displays of nature, like storms and blizzards and all those things like that. To this day I’m thankful that there was this area immediately to the east of our farm called a bog, and there was nobody living for about 20 miles…It was wild then, there were no fences. We used to love to go out there in order to get away from farm life.

The bog represented both an escape from his daily labours and an area of play, exploration and creative potential, a transient space that occupied both domestic and natural worlds.

The romance of the untamed hinterland that the wetlands represented was intensified rather than tempered by its proximity to the family farm. Kurelek wrote how his father left the eastern end of their farm fallow to grow for pasture, allowing the cows to graze in the bog through the summer; and how the wetlands became skating rinks in the winter and ponds to wade through in the spring melt. The “bog road” of the painting’s title was the straight, unpaved road that led to this transient space, lined by deep drainage ditches that can be seen as extensions of the swamp. The proximity of this relationship of the bog and the ditches is structured in the painting through the intensity of the single-point perspective, accentuating as well the openness of the prairie. The overall impression is relaxed—across the ditch, a group of dairy cows ambles along the fence, while the farmhouse lays low in the distance. One field over, the earth lies freshly tilled and awaiting planting, while farther still can be seen round bales of hay. The boundary between farmland and wildland is marked by the long, distant line of trees under scudding rain clouds, where a storm is breaking on the horizon.

This scene is not derived from memory but likely drawn from one of the artist’s trips to Stonewall and rural Manitoba as an adult in the 1960s and 1970s. There is a palpable sense of an absence here, an afterimage of Kurelek’s childhood that can be felt in the placidity of the landscape and the bucolic pastoralism of the farm. There is no buzz of roughhousing children, no mischief-making antics (apart, perhaps, from the small farm dog jauntily greeting the cows to the right). Similarly, there are no overt indications of Kurelek’s more didactic impulses: no farmers at labour or at rest, spectacular religious tableaux, or markers of nature’s cosmic ambivalence to man. Instead, we get the sense that this is an image taken from direct observation, grounded in the eye-level perspective of a photograph. There is a sense of continuity, that Kurelek’s nostalgia is present as a memory of what has already passed through the landscape rather than existing within it, allowing the scene to be an unmediated celebration of nature and prairie life.

This work is in the original frame made by the artist.

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