Artwork by Bruno Joseph Bobak,  Vancouver Harbour

Bruno Bobak
Vancouver Harbour

oil on canvas
signed lower right; signed and titled on the reverse
40 x 48 ins ( 101.6 x 121.9 cms )

Auction Estimate: $7,000.00$5,000.00 - $7,000.00

Price Realized $4,720.00
Sale date: May 28th 2019

Provenance:
Roberts Gallery, Toronto
Private Collection, Ontario
Literature:
Alan C. Elder and Ian Thom, A Modern Life: Art and Design in British Columbia, 1945-1960, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2004, page 113
A celebrated war artist during the Second World War, Bruno Bobak gained his artistic training through this experience, working from photographs as reference and honing his skill with other war artists. After the war, he married Molly Lamb Bobak, a fellow war artist and later moved to Vancouver in 1947. There, he took a teaching post at the Vancouver School of Art from 1947-1957 and continued to develop his landscape practice.

Similar to artists like Goodridge Roberts and Alan Collier, Bobak's landscapes have a flattened approach and border with abstract experimentations of form. “Vancouver Harbour” showcases the effects of light from the setting sun, executed in a mosaic-like patterning of the paint strokes. The scene is approached from a high vantage looking down over the harbour, likely from Confederation Park looking West with Burnaby Heights to the left of the composition and the Maplewood Flats Conservation Area to the right, the railway bridge straddling Burrard Inlet. Punctuated with bright cadmium blue, teal and yellow, the setting sun at the centre of the composition acts as a certain guiding beacon for the ships in the inlet and cast a a near spiritual glow over the Vancouver landscape below.

Scott Watson writes that these cityscape's break from Bobak's traditional rural landscapes and are “luminous and ecstatic, brimming with bright colours that distance their work from the grey-scale genre.”

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Bruno Joseph Bobak
(1923 - 2013) RCA

Born in Wawelowska, Poland in 1923, Bruno Bobak came to Canada in 1927. At the age of thirteen, he began Saturday morning art classes in Toronto under Arthur Lismer and later at the Central Technical School.

In 1942, he joined the army and, shortly thereafter, was selected to be an official war artist. He went overseas and while there, studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London, 1944. He married fellow war artist Molly Lamb in 1945. He and Molly settled briefly in Ottawa after the war working as artists and moved to Vancouver in 1947 where he taught at the Vancouver School of Art.

There are few crafts which he had not worked at including pottery, metal work, furniture making and textile printing. As an expressionist painter his media included oils, watercolours and woodcuts. He is known for his work on flowers and landscapes. Paul Duval noted his wood engraving “Kelp” and his general work in this medium. His concrete mural for the Vancouver School of Art, completed in 1952, appeared in Canadian Art.

During the summer of 1956 he travelled eight thousand miles to New York with his wife, stopping along the way to sketch. In 1957-8 he studied abroad on a Canadian Overseas Senior Fellowship. His work was selected for exhibit at the Canadian Pavilion at Brussels, Belgium in 1959 and during this same year he attended the Art School and Guilds of London, England.

After a decade of work as an artist and instructor of art on the west coast, he moved his family to Fredericton, New Brunswick in 1960 to serve as artist in residence at the University of New Brunswick. In 1962, he took on the role of Director of the University of New Brunswick Art Centre.

Over the years, Bobak’s work attracted the attention of many critics including Robert Fulford who noted, “His painting is electric, certainly; we never know whether the next work will lean more towards the angled wiriness of art nouveau or the slim splendour of Japanese painting. But he manages so often to pull these disparate elements together into a work of art that is entirely unified and personal that complaints about electricism shrink to insignificance.”

Bruno Bobak was a member of the Canada Group of Painters, Society of Canadian Painter-Etchers and Engravers, Canadian Society of Graphic Art, Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour, British Columbia Society of Artists, and the Royal Canadian Academy. He participated in more than two hundred and fifty group exhibitions and had more than eighty one-man shows, both in Canada and abroad. He is represented in the Norman Mackenzie Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada and other collections.

Source: "A Dictionary of Canadian Artists, Volume I: A-F", compiled by Colin S. MacDonald, Canadian Paperbacks Publishing Ltd, Ottawa, 1977