2018 May | Hodgins Art Auctions

Notes:

signed; titled & dated on the artist’s label verso (AK-861)
Provenance: De Vought Gallery, Vancouver BC
Note: Allen Sapp’s mother (Agnes Soonias) was often ill during his childhood, suffering from tuberculosis, and died when the artist was about 14 years old. At this point, Sapp was cared for predominantly by her parents, who had helped his mother care for him during his childhood. In this rare work, Sapp shares an early memory from his time with his mother, where she sits mending, while Nokum smokes her pipe.

Notes:

signed & titled

Notes:

signed & titled

Notes:

signed, titled & dated

Notes:

monogrammed recto; signed, titled & dated on the stretcher verso

Notes:

signed; titled on the gallery label verso

Notes:

signed

Notes:

signed, titled & dated

Notes:

signed & dated; titled on the artist’s label verso

Provenance: This piece was commissioned from Molly Lamb Bobak by the president of the Growers Wine Company (one of the earliest known wine producers in British Columbia, created in 1927). The painting hung at the company’s main office in Victoria BC for many years and has come by descent to the current owner (Private Collection, Calgary AB).

Note: Born and raised in the Vancouver area, Molly Joan Lamb studied at the Vancouver School of Art (1938-41) before enlisting with the Canadian Women’s Army Corp. in 1942. She became Canada’s first female official war artist three years later, meeting fellow artist Bruno Bobak during her time in London, England. After marrying, the Bobaks returned to Vancouver for a number of years, before Bruno Bobak accepted a teaching position at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, where the couple settled.

During her years back in Vancouver (1947-60) Molly Lamb Bobak focused on teaching and raising her children. She taught at the Vancouver School of Art (1947-60), the Vancouver Art Gallery (1954-58), and the University of British Columbia (1958-60). There was not a lot of spare time for painting, though her talent did not go unnoticed by Alan Jarvis, then Director of the National Gallery of Canada, who encouraged her to submit her work to Canadian and international exhibitions. Molly Lamb Bobak went on to have a long teaching and exhibition career, honored with a travelling retrospective of her work in 1992. Her work can be found in many public collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Canadian War Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Notes:

signed, titled, dated & editioned; inscribed on the lower left margin of the paper “Provenance Artist’s Archives. Art Gallery of Ontario Travelling Show 1976”

Note: This work is illustrated on p. 72 of “David Blackwood: Master Printmaker” (Gough; Firefly Books, 2001)

Between 1950 and the early 1970s, the Newfoundland government closed 250 coastal villages. Premier Joey Smallwood, who led Newfoundland and Labrador into Confederation in 1949, believed these outports to be too isolated, and providing services there proved inconvenient. 30,000 people were uprooted, including David Blackwood’s family; the home of his maternal grandparents was on Bragg’s Island, having been built by his grandfather, David Glover, as his matrimonial home. David Blackwood’s recollection of the event that influenced this print is captured on page 59 of Gough’s book:

No one had ever heard of such a thing as resettlement when young David sat in the front of a motorboat on his way to Bragg’s Island, waiting for the first sighting of the warning light. “Then one night,” recalls Blackwood, “Gram Glover had a dream. I can remember her coming down to the kitchen that morning. ‘Well, well, well,’ she said. ‘I had a funny dream last night, that we all had to pack up and leave this place. That we had to pack up and everything was torn to pieces, like there was another war coming. The whole place was in a shambles. There must be another war coming!’

“When the time came for them to be resettled, they didn’t shift the house, you know; they took it down. And my grandfather locked himself in his shed and wouldn’t come out. So his own son started to take the house down; piece by piece, he took apart the house.”