MAKING A SMUDGE

mixed media on masonite

14 x 14 in. (35.6 x 35.6 cm)

Price Realized:

$ 36000 CAD.

INCLUDES BUYER’S PREMIUM

Notes:

monogrammed and dated lower right; titled verso

Provenance: The Isaacs Gallery, Toronto ON (label verso); Downstairs Gallery, Edmonton AB (stamped verso)

Reference: “A Prairie Boy’s Summer” (William Kurelek; Tundra Books of Montreal; 1975). This book includes a full-page illustration of a very similar example (#14), from the collection of Art Windsoe-Essex (formerly Art Gallery of Windsor). A copy of the book will accompany the painting.

William Kurelek was born in 1927 on his family’s farm near Whitfield, Alberta. The eldest of seven children born to Dmytro and Mary Kurelek, young Kurelek grew up in a Ukrainian-Canadian farming family: Dmytro immigrated from Western Ukraine in 1924, while Mary was the daughter of first-generation Ukrainian immigrants who had arrived in Canada at the turn of the century. Kurelek spent his first seven years at Whitfield before the family moved to a farm near Stonewall, Manitoba in 1934. From the beginning of his career, both in his art and his writing, the artist closely examined his childhood on the prairies. His work frequently returned to memories of early childhood experiences, offering both nostalgic and honest accounts of the realities of life during the Great Depression.

The composition for “Making a Smudge” (1976) first appeared in Kurelek’s second children’s book, “A Prairie Boy’s Summer” (1975). Kurelek would return to these images in later paintings, like we see here, spurred by the popularity of their subjects. He often referred to them as “potboilers”, a somewhat self-deprecating label from the humble artist, for these pastoral scenes of prairie life that would become among the artist’s best-known paintings. “A Prairie Boy’s Winter and Summer”, and this overall aspect of his practice, were enormously popular and established Kurelek as a beloved “people’s painter”. Critics and collectors alike resonated with these evocative scenes of prairie life.

On Making a Smudge, #14 in “A Prairie Boy’s Summer”, Kurelek wrote the following accompaniment:

“Apart from milking, dairying was much easier in summer than in winter. After his father put up an electric fence the cows took little looking after; all the boys had to do was pump a tankful of water for them.

But every summer evening, there was one more favor the cattle appreciated – especially in wetter years. Clouds of mosquitoes appeared – people said they came off the bog to the east – and William’s parents would send him out at sunset to build a smudge fire to protect the animals from the pests.

Making a smudge wasn’t the same as making a bonfire though it was sometimes called that. William’s father showed him how to mix layers of dry straw with layers of wet straw or manure so that the pile would glow and smoke instead of blaze. Otherwise the fire would burn out long before daylight and the cattle would be unprotected. Of course, if there was no breeze the smoke didn’t help much, for it went straight up. But that didn’t happen very often.

William found there were really no gentlemen in the animal world. Even if the cows got to the smudge first, the farm horses always came along and took away the places in the smoke. The cows knew the horses were bullies, so they moved out of the way before they were bitten or pushed aside.”

While there is a sentimental quality to the illustrative imagery and text, the apparent simplicity is deceptive. Kurelek’s childhood, which he is depicting here, was by no means gentle. An anxious and introverted child, Kurelek struggled deeply to connect with others, was physically fragile, and experienced mental health challenges from an early age. In his autobiography, “Someone With Me”, he describes his life as an outsider both in his family and at school. Moreover, farm work is grueling. As The New York Times noted of “A Prairie Boy’s Summer”, the book “walks the straight furrow between the sentimentality of nostalgia and the brutalizing of sweated labor.”

Like much of Kurelek’s work, “Making A Smudge” is a duality. As the evening sun sets, glowing softly over the trees, the young William pitchforks a burning pile of hay and manure: a tender and harsh image that captures both the quiet beauty of a prairie evening and the difficult, gritty realities of farm life.