AMY'S COSMOS
oil on canvas
48 x 40 in.
framed
SOLD

Amy’s Cosmos” is part of a series of paintings that Bobak made mid-career.  These ultra-realistic floral paintings were a departure from his more expressionist landscape and figure paintings.  Instead of the broad brush strokes and thick texture, Bobak painted in thin layers and created a highly smooth surface.  “With their delicate textures and realistic blooms, these flower canvases remind one of Dutch and Flemish trompe-l’oeil still lifes, a very different effect from the harsh, bold impasto of the big figure paintings…” (“Bruno Bobak: The Full Palette,” Beaverbrook Art Gallery, 2006).  Bobak, an avid gardener, grew the flowers himself, often from seed, making the creations as close to the artist as one might hope and showing a diversity of character that was this complex artistic spirit.  The painting “Amy’s Cosmos” was part of an exhibition titled “Winter Garden” at the UNB Art Centre in 1982.  This exhibition, which was dedicated exclusively to the subject of flowers and vegetables, was reviewed in the Globe and Mail: “…the paintings’ vibrancy of colors, expert molding of paints into images of flowers and gleaming ripe garden vegetables, stimulate the senses in anticipation of warm summer days…At the same time, these compositions of exotic, intricately arranged patterns of colors and forms project an elusive quality…represents an affirmation of the existence and continuous propagation of beauty, and our overt desire to display it and be surrounded by it.  It also manifests a wide range of emotions – tenderness, admiration, serenity, loneliness, excitement and passion.”  (Christina Sabat in the Globe and Mail, March 16, 1982)  The reference to emotion is one which transcends Bobak’s paintings.  “Amy’s Cosmos” is a true delight and significant as a representation of a period of one of Canada’s greatest contemporary painters. 

Aged 20 and just out of art studies at Central Technical School in Toronto, Bruno Bobak made an impressive debut as a professional artist. Having enlisted in the army, he submitted a watercolour to an army art exhibition, won first prize, and was appointed as an official war artist in 1943. From then on he was included in important exhibitions and galleries in Canada, the United States and abroad with opportunity to travel, explore, and broaden his creative experiences. It was during one such study trip to Europe that news arrived of his appointment as artist-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick in 1960. It was to be only a one-year stay in Fredericton, but it turned out to be a lifetime. From 1962 until his retirement in 1987, Bruno Bobak was director of the UNB Art Centre.

In Fredericton, in the 60s, from his studio on the campus of the university, Bruno Bobak produced some of his most vital figurative work - large canvases of life-size figures aggressively yet tenderly depicted in a dripping mix of paints, jarring colors and great sweeping gestures of expressionism. Within the relative isolation of New Brunswick, Bobak found himself in an environment and setting which afforded him the mental space and physical opportunity to do and say what he needed in his art. It culminated in a major touring exhibition, Bruno Bobak's "Humanism", which toured the Atlantic region in 1971.

But Bruno Bobak's art has never been limited nor confined to a single subject, medium, technique, style or vision. A consummate craftsman, he is equally adept at drawing, watercolors, printmaking, oil painting, mural-making and sculpture. With ingenuity and imagination he also designed and planted vegetable and flower gardens, reinvented uses for discarded industrial materials, designed and decorated his house, and fashioned his own furniture. Such diversification reflected his strong background in design at Central Tech. In the '50s he would head the design department at the Vancouver School of Art. Subjects for art-making also varied: landscapes, figures, portraits, still-life, flowers, vegetables, street scenes, harbours, and buildings. Interestingly, in terms of style, in the past 25 years Bobak has returned to his stark realist style of early years. Textures have become smooth and flattened, colors patterned, the palette heightened in tone, and the structure of compositions more consciously designed and ordered.

Bobak has won numerous awards and prizes, among them a Canada Council Senior Fellowship and the Queen Elizabeth Medal; the 1954 Jessie Dow Prize, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; the 1955 C.W. Jeffreys Award, Canadian Society of Graphic Art; Honorable Mention "First Exhibition of Drawing and Prints", Lugano, Switzerland; the  K.B. Baker Memorial Purchase Award "Forty-First Annual Exhibition of North West Artists", Seattle, Washington; the 1957 Prize, Monsanto Art Competition, Montreal; Royal Society Canadian Government Overseas Fellowship.  In 1982 his painting "Campus Gates" was chosen for a Canada Post stamp, representing New Brunswick in a block of 12 stamps of all the provinces and territories. In 1998 Canada Post featured a work by Bobak for it's 90-cent stamp in the "Masterpieces of Canadian Art" series.  He designed the New Brunswick Bicentennial Medal in 1984, and in 1985 was commissioned by Parks Canada to create an original multiple of a New Brunswick scene (Martello Tower) for presentation to the Governor General Madame Jeanne Sauve.  The artist was presented with an honorary degree (LLD) from Saint Thomas University in 1984, and was awarded a DLit from UNB in 1986. In the autumn of 1995 he received the Order of Canada for his unique and lasting contributions to Canadian Art and for fostering artistic and cultural life in New Brunswick and Canada.

Bobak's work is part of major public gallery collections across Canada, among them the National Gallery of Canada, the Candian War Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and in Fredericton, the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, the University of New Brunswick, and the Provincial Art Bank.  His paintings are included in countless prestigious corporate and private collections.  His work is very well documented in numerous publications, including “Bruno Bobak: The Full Palette”, published in 2006 by Goose Lane Editions and the Beaverbrook Art Gallery.

THE TIRED GUARD
oil on canvas
48 x 30 in.
framed
SOLD