Posts Tagged ‘Canada’s War Art’

Over the last 95 years, more than 200 artists have been charged with capturing the military history of our nation. With their brush stokes they recorded Vimy Ridge, the Somme, D-Day, Korea, Bosnia and Afghanistan to mention only a few. They sketched and painted amidst gunfire, explosions and death, and their work still has an immediacy that gets to the emotional root of war and conflict.

Scott Waters has an unusual vantage point for an artist. Over the last two decades he has created a body of work that both supports and tears down the mythology of soldiering. For the three years before that, he lived it. Twenty-three years ago the artist served as an infantryman in the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (PPCLI).

In 1985, on the 75th anniversary of the Royal Canadian Navy, Geoffrey Bagley donated 92 naval artworks to the Canadian War Museum, so in this the centennial year of the navy, it seems fitting to celebrate his contribution to Canada’s war art.

The Flanders poppy has been the most recognized symbol of remembrance for the last 90 years, and so one would expect to find the scarlet flower proliferating in the over 13,000 artworks in the collection of the Canadian War Museum. Instead, images of the poppy are surprisingly rare. Perhaps Canadian artists were not present when the poppies bloomed like blood on the battlefields after the First and Second World Wars, or perhaps the flower’s significance was not broadly understood until the wars ended. But if you look, you will find it flowering in a dozen works or so, and in a [...]

Canada has sent thousands of soldiers and a number of artists to war, and both roles have remained distinct and perhaps opposite in nature. Soldiers are trained, as best as they can be, for the grim environment of war, but the artist is in alien territory trying to record his surroundings with sensitivity and nuance—a setting he has little training for. The two vocations are disconnected, yet Will Ogilvie excelled at both. He endured years of wartime service on battlefields and simultaneously produced watercolours that stand among the best in this country. Born at Stutterheim, South Africa, in March 1901, Ogilvie [...]