William Kurelek
| William Kurelek | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
March 3, 1927 near Whitford, Alberta in Canada |
| Died | November 3, 1977 (aged 50) Toronto, Canada |
| Nationality | Canada |
| Alma mater | University of Manitoba |
| Occupation | Artist |
| Years active | 1950s–1977 |
| Notable work | The Maze, Passion of Christ series |
William Kurelek, CM (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.
His father, Dymtro 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. Dymtro and Mary were cousins. 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 was born near Whitford, Alberta in 1927, the oldest of seven children in a Ukrainian immigrant family: Bill, John, Winn, Nancy, Sandy, Paul, Iris. 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.
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