William Kurelek’s Day Valley On A Grey Day Research Assignment

WILLIAM KURELEK’S DAY VALLEY ON A GREY DAY
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William Kurelek is a Canadian artist born in 1927 in Alberta to immigrant parents. By the time of his death in Toronto fifty years later, Kurelek was recognized as one of the most distinguished and beloved artists and an author of children content in the country. The legacy of the artist includes numerous paintings and drawings as well as books in Canada, USA, and England. The artist presents great skills and capabilities in delivering to the audience the world from his own perspective. According to Kurelek, the people are more important than the art. In this light, the people are the most distinctive features in the artist's artwork. He uses people to tell tales about how they work, play, and live. The significance of the artist in the Canadian culture is evident in how his paintings have been widely reproduced in books and children's literature. In thirty years, Kurelek developed between 2000 and 4000 artworks that presented nostalgic and nightmarish products. From a general perspective, the artist’s work offers a visual proposition that highlights the nature of a fluctuating world in his environment and the common struggles that often divide and bind the people. Insights from his bibliography and analysis show that most of Kurelek’s paintings offer a theatrical and filmic approach to communicate to the audience. In this context, his paintings offer figures that are presented in a dramatic stance that include dynamic gestures and weighted body language. Using these approaches reels the debt and appreciation the artist has for kinetic visuals of film and theatre, and the effectiveness of photographic records. Subsequently, the artist has in various pieces of art relied on inspiration from painters who used photography to develop their works. The intent of this paper is to address the inspiration of photography by the Kurelek with a focus on his work in the painting Don Valley on a Grey Day, 1972.
The art piece Don Valley on a Grey Day was created by the artist as a response and inspiration by the 401 Towards London No.1, 1968 to 1969 by Jack Chambers. The artist’s sensibility towards the use of photographic inspiration was forged early in his work as a result of his love for film that included Odd Man Out of 1947 and Portrait of Jennie of 1948 as well as The Picture of Dorian Gray of 1945. Reviews of these three films show that the protagonist is focused on finding a moral footing. These sentiments confirm the focus Kurelek had in developing his art; he was focused on communicating and intriguing the audience to think and act on various aspects that affected their livelihood. The sensibility consciously influenced his creation of the Don Valley on a Grey Day. The inspiration from photography became a critical tool to the success of Kurelek as an artist due to the capacity to offer a trusted and omnipresent pictorial aid that fostered the artist’s capability to recreate a collection of paintings that highlighted his experiences in the 1960s and 1970s. In this light, the camera was critical to his painting career because he conceived his memories in photographic approach. Subsequently, the photographs were critical to his m...