Historical BC Art

GORDON CARUSO (1923-2004) was a British Columbian painter in the abstract tradition. In 1964 he was part of the ‘NEW Talent–BC’ exhibit at the VAG that featured Claude Breeze, Paul Wong, David Mayrs and Audrey Capel Doray. He and his contemporaries, such as Gordon Smith and Peter Aspell, set the direction for many B.C. artists. Caruso was also a powerful teacher and communicator who influenced many artists during his substantial teaching career. Many pieces of Caruso's art can be read as a reaction to his Second World War service in The Special Service Force. Caruso has exhibited in major North American galleries, and his work is in numerous private and corporate collections. He taught at the University of B.C., Simon Fraser University, Vancouver School of Art and Vancouver's Langara College. His final studio was on Salt Spring Island where he continued to create his mixed media sculptural collages. He will be part of the Unheralded Artists of BC series.

MILDRED VALLEY THORNTON (1890-1967) Born in Dresden, Ontario in 1890, she moved with her family to Regina in 1913 and became interested in the Plains Indians. She began to paint professionally in the 1920s, painting portraits of more than 300 aboriginal people. In response to the Depression, she came with her family to Vancouver in 1934. Having attended Olivet College in Michigan, the Ontario School of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, she wrote for the Vancouver Sun as an art critic from 1944 to 1959. Thornton was inducted into the Royal Society of Arts in 1954 and became president of the Canadian Women's Press Club, but she could never attain her greatest wish: to have the government of Canada accept her donation of her work en masse. She died in 1967, at age 77. Embittered by the lack of official support for her art, she had a codicil in her will that requested all her paintings should be burned to ashes after her death. This codicil was not acted upon on the grounds that it had not been legally witnessed. In 2011 Mother Tongue Publishing will publish The Life & Art of Mildred Valley Thornton by Sheryl Salloum.

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PETER PAUL OCHS (1931-1994) was born in East Prussia and came to Canada in 1952. He studied in Paris at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere under internationally renowned sculptor Ossip Zadkine (1956), and in Hamburg under Hans Ruwoldt (1957). Ochs exhibited in the first outdoor exhibition of BC sculpture at UBC, the Vancouver Art Gallery, at the Seattle Art Museum (1959), the National Gallery of Canada (1964) and was a founding member of the Sculptors’ Society of B.C. He was the recipient of a Canada Council Award in 1965. Among his many important installations is the “Story of Raven” at the British Columbia Museum, Victoria, and B.C. He spent his final years commuting between Greece, Vancouver and Gibsons, British Columbia, working primarily on watercolours and small sculptures. He died in 1994. He will be part of the Unheralded Artists of BC series.

FRANK MOLNAR (1936- ) fled from Budapest during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and went to the USA where he studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In 1962 he headed for Vancouver to forge his artistic destiny as a painter. There he met artists David Marshall, Peter Aspell, Georg Schmerholz, Elek Imredy and Jack Akroyd. In 1969 he became one of the first art teachers at Capilano College and taught life drawing and artistic anatomy for almost 30 years. His students included Charles van Sandwyk, Cori Creed, Andrew McDermott & Will Rafuse. He has rarely exhibited publicly. He lives in Vancouver with his wife Sylvia. He is featured in the 2nd book on The Unheralded Artists of BC, The Life & Art of Frank Molnar, Jack Hardman, LeRoy Jensen, by Eve Lazarus, Claudia Cornwall, Wendy Newbold Patterson, 2009.

LEROY JENSEN (1927-2005) spent his childhood in China, Japan and Vancouver and studied painting at the Royal Academy of Copenhagen and under the French cubist André LHote in Paris. In 1954 he returned to Vancouver to paint and forged a friendship with fellow artists, Jock Hearn, David Marshall, Herbert Siebner and Peter Aspell. He was a founding member of Greenpeace and later a member of the Victoria-based Limner group. In 1982 he moved to Salt Spring Island with his family, where he fought for social environmental causes and continued to paint the human condition, especially women, until his death in 2005. His work is at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, The Maltwood Art Museum & Gallery and the Burnaby Art Gallery. He is featured in the 2nd book in the Unheralded Artists of BC, The Life & Art of Frank Molnar, Jack Hardman, LeRoy Jensen, by Eve Lazarus, Claudia Cornwall, Wendy Newbold Patterson 2009.

GEORGE FERTIG (1915-1983) was born in Alberta and moved to Vancouver in 1941. George’s creative passion began at age twenty with photography during the Depression. In the ‘30s, he travelled to Mexico in the ‘40s, where he met Diego Rivera, and in the ‘50s, American artist Morris Graves became a friend and important influence. Known as the “Moon Man,” George Fertig was an artist’s artist, and his unique oil paintings have found no duplication in Canada. His paintings range from early landscapes, to large and powerful archetypal images in the ’50s and '60s, to small numinous meditations on eternity. His paintings were rarely exhibited in galleries and today are coveted in private collections. Carl Jung was one of his biggest influences. The 3rd book in The Unheralded Artists of BC series will be on The Life & Art of George Fertig by Mona Fertig, published in time for his retrospective at the Burnaby Art Gallery in June 1 – July 11th, 2010.