William Kurelek

Dmytro arrived to work on the Huculak farm early in 1923.

The couple married in the summer of 1925, his mother not quite nineteen at the time.

William Kurelek, (March 3, 1927 – November 3, 1977) was a Canadian artist and writer.

His work was influenced by his childhood on the prairies, his Ukrainian-Canadian roots, his struggles with mental illness, and his conversion to Roman Catholicism.

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.

His father, Dmytro Kurelek, was born in Boriwtsi, Bukovina.

Mary Huculak, his mother, was born in Canada, and received her elementary education in a local rural school.

Her family had come with the first wave of Ukrainian immigration to Canada and was also from Boriwtsi.

Dmytro and Mary were cousins.

His family lost their grain farm during the Great Depression and moved to a six-hundred-acre former dairy farm near Stonewall, Manitoba, around 1933.

A cousin let the family off from his wagon at the gate of their new farm in pitch darkness.

The back of their farm bordered on the bog, today Oak Hammock Marsh.

Some of his paintings in the books A prairie boy's summer and A prairie boy's winter depict Kurelek and other children in the setting of the bogland.

Treelines along the horizon recorded by him in these paintings are still recognizable in the area.

"Victoria School could be seen from our milkhouse a mile away."

It was the one-room schoolhouse that Kurelek and his brother, John, attended.

When about to enter high school, their father announced that they would do so in Winnipeg, where he purchased a house on Burrows Ave., seeing this as the economically wiser course than throwing money away on rent.

Weekends, food was brought in by their parents from the farm to help Offset the cost of living in the city.

Eventually, their sister Winnie joined her brothers.

They attended Isaac Newton High School a few blocks away.

Kurelek was at the top of his class in German, and did well in all the other subjects.

Just around the corner from the house was St. Mary the Protectoress Ukrainian Orthodox church where he attended Ukrainian school, and found a very positive father figure in Rev. P. Majewsky.

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.

By this time the family farm had been sold and his father had moved the family to Vinemount, Ontario near Hamilton.

Kurelek had developed an early interest in art, which was not encouraged by his hard-working parents.

Despite this, he enrolled at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto.

His explanation to his father was that there was money to be made in commercial art.

In fact, he had no intention of going into commercial art.

During this time, he worked at odd jobs to support himself, such as at a carwash on University Ave. At the OCA, he found himself to be the only student with a university degree.

Here, he studied the great contemporary Mexican artists: Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco.

His innate appeal and love of murals may have originated in his boyhood, when in his absence his father ventured one day upstairs and into his son's room to discover, much to his horror, the walls covered in unseemly illustrations.

Kurelek's friends at the OCA told him about a School of Fine Arts in San Miguel, Mexico, which might grant him a scholarship if he produced something worthwhile.

Fired by the thought of studying with one of the great Mexican mural painters, he painted his first self-portrait.

Though he studied at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto and at the Instituto Allende in Mexico, he was primarily self-taught from books.

Zaporozhian Cossacks, a gift to his father, is the last painting Kurelek did before leaving for Europe for the first time, and shows the influence of the Mexican muralists on his work.

By his mid-twenties he had moved to England.

In 1952, suffering from clinical depression and emotional problems, he admitted himself into the Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital in London.

There he was treated for schizophrenia.

In hospital he painted, producing The Maze, a dark depiction of his tortured youth.

His experience in the hospital was documented in the LIFE Science Library book The Mind, published in 1965.