It's Up!

The show of photographs of Vancouver during wartime is now up in the lobby of the Firehall. You can pop in and see the show during the day Wednesday through Saturday from 1-5 pm, or check it out when you come to see the play called Vimy by Vern Thiessen. Thanks so much to the folks who helped me hang the show. I ended up choosing to mount and frame photographs from World War II (as opposed to WWI). As I worked on creating the show I became intrigued with the idea that a few of the children in the photos might still be alive today and would be able to tell us their memories of the events portrayed in the show. Also, these people in the photos are the grandparents, parents, uncles and aunts of people who may have more photos and stories of Vancouver during wartime in their own collections. I urge you to talk to your family, ask them about the war and become your own family's archivist so that we don't lose these stories. This show is suitable for families to view together and would be a good place for younger people to learn about the city's history. The show fits into the grade 11 curriculum, but I would say that it is suitable for grade 5 and up.

Of course now that the show is up I will likely find other photos I would have loved to put in the show, so my wish is to keep researching and searching for photos of Vancouver during WWII to create a future project. I am particularly interested in furthering research into Canada's Victory Gardens. I would also be interested in working with schools to create art around the subjects covered in this exhibition.

On Monday night the Firehall organized a fabulous community dialogue around the role of art in war. I outlined the process of creating the exhibition and discussed the role of propaganda in wartime. Rob MacDonald, curator of the Seaforth Highlanders Museum in Vancouver talked about his passion for finding the stories attached to the photographs and objects in the museum. He is an eloquent storyteller and his extensive knowledge of history helps him to unearth the mysteries hidden in the collection. Right now MacDonald and his staff are in the process of digitizing the collection so that families from all over the world can trace photographs of their loved ones. He says he gets a couple of calls every week of people trying to track down photos or information about a family member who served in the Seaforth. You can visit the Seaforth Museum at 1650 Burrard Street on Wednesdays 7:30 to 9 pm, September through April.

We also heard from a painter named Christopher Baird Hennebery. Chris studied painting at Emily Carr and served in the Royal Westminster Regiment for over twenty years. He created his own project called Painting to Afghanistan and this year he traveled to Afghanistan to take photographs, sketch and draw. Unlike Canada's official war artists, Chris went outside the safe zone, put on his body armor and worked in incredibly dangerous conditions.

As a note to other artists: if you think your insurance bill is high, war artists have to be insured for $15,000.

A War Artist with Chutzpah: Molly Lamb Bobak

War Artist: Did you know the first woman war artist is from Vancouver? Molly Lamb Bobak joined the Canadian Women's Army Corps in 1942. Her mentors included A.Y. Jackson and Jack Shadbolt.

"You joined the navy if you wanted to be chic because they had the nicest uniforms, but I preferred the army,'' she says. " My mother drove me to the old Vancouver Hotel at the intersection of Georgia and Granville, and waited outside while I signed up."

After washing dishes and other menial chores for three years she had the moxy to hitchhike to Ottawa to convince the director of the National Gallery to get her a job as a war artist.

"I was an optimist more than a feminist, and I had to work very hard to become a war artist, to the point of making a damn nuisance of myself,'' she says.

She sketched and painted her fellow officers in Canada during the war and was sent to post-war Holland. She made sketches in the field and then was set up in a studio she was supposed to share with another war artist, Bruno Bobak. He wasn't happy about having to share a studio with a woman and said they'd divide the studio down the middle to avoid one another. However, the two ended up sharing the rest of their lives together they still live in Fredricton New Brunswick.

I highly recommend this article by Marty Klinkenberg from the Telegraph Journal (which I sourced the quotes from above) on Molly Lamb Bobak and Bruno Bobak, particularly the story of the meeting with Lord Beaverbrooke. The article also states:

"Bruno Bobak and Molly Lamb were engaged through a similar government initiative three decades later, and most of their works are now part of the collection at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. In all, Canada enlisted 32 official artists in the Second World War, and between them they produced approximately 5,000 drawings.

Together, the Bobaks accounted for 241."

Their work from the war is in several collections around Canada and you can buy some of their recent war from their website. One of my favorite of Molly's paintings is an image of one of her fellow CWACs, Private Roy.

The description of the work from the Canadian War Museum website states:

"Bobak sketched Private Roy several times in a canteen in Halifax, Nova Scotia, before undertaking the finished portrait. In a 1985 interview the artist commented: 'The painting has caught her at a point in time; she'll always be young and she'll always be Private Roy to those who see her.'"