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A Prairie Boy's Winter

William Kurelek

Text and twenty color paintings depict the rigors and simple pleasures during the stark 1930s.
A Northern Nativity

William Kurelek

Artist William Kurelek created this uniquely moving book on the theme that Christ came to all people everywhere. What would happen if He came now? A boy imagines that the nativity takes place in northern snows. He dreams that the Christ child is born to Eskimos, to Indians, to Blacks, that the Nativity takes place in a fisherman’s hut, a garage, a cowboy’s barn, that the holy family is given refuge in a city mission, a grain barn, and a country school. A beautiful holiday story for all generations.
A Prairie Boy's Summer

William Kurelek

Summer on the prairies during the Depression years was not a vacation from school; it was hard work.
They Sought a New World

William Kurelek

Since 1820, some 50 million Europeans have immigrated to the United States and Canada. Their story has been told in many ways, but never like this. William Kurelek created hundreds of “immigrant” paintings that depicted his own family’s stories. He also wrote many of these stories down. Editor Margaret Engelhart has gathered these stories and paintings to create a unique introduction on what it meant to be an immigrant and the child of an immigrant.
Breaking Free: The Story of William Kurelek

May Ebbitt Cutler

Nominated in the nonfiction category for the 2004/2005 Red Cedar Book Awards (British Columbia's Young Reader's Choice book award)

William Kurelek was an internationally acclaimed artist, described by the New York Times as “the North American Brueghel.” Kurelek’s art was brilliant, but his life was difficult in many ways. Born in Alberta and raised on a Manitoba dairy farm, he suffered abuse at the hands of his father. Critics ignored his early paintings, and Kurelek fought a desperate battle with depression. How did such a tormented man create such a stunning legacy that is enjoyed around the world?

May Ebbitt Cutler, who published William Kurelek’s award-winning books and knew him as artist and friend, tells the story of a haunted man, and the art that is his legacy.
Lumberjack

William Kurelek

When William Kurelek was young, he went into the bush to work as a lumberjack twice. Realizing that the traditional life of a lumberjack was disappearing, he decided to record in pictures and text a job that helped to make Canada the country it is. Kurelek takes readers through a day in the bush, from the first wake-up to breakfast, to the different phases of cutting wood, to how the men spent their free time. Hardship and pleasures were shared in the creation of these unforgettable paintings.
The Last of the Arctic

William Kurelek
To My Father's Village

William Kurelek

Two months before his death from cancer in 1977, William Kurelek returned to his father’s village in the Ukraine. The Soviet authorities had allowed him to spend four hours there in 1970, and the desire to return had become an obsession with him. In his diary of that trip he wrote, “Let the authorities let me come back to spend six weeks painting the real (to me) Ukrainian people…Those peasants that we met in the collective farm’s fields, the vast rolling fields, speak to me as an artist…let me live with these people as an artist…let me live with these people, dress as they dress, eat their food, sleep on the peech.”

During his four weeks spent in the little village of Borivtsi, Bukovina, he had managed with incredible energy to complete 100 drawings and six paintings. They are an extraordinary legacy, a record of a search to understand the world out of which his father came and thereby himself, to solve the dilemma of the immigrant’s son, to know whether he belonged more to the Old World or the New.

An extraordinary feature of the drawings is how lovingly they record the simple handmade objects of farm life: the dishes, untensils, tools, and farm implements. The drawings and paintings reproduced here are supplemented with letters written to his wife Jean during the 1970 trip and his personal photographs.