Artworks

Molly Bobak depicts the beauty of the ordinary: views of interiors, still lifes, urbanscapes - and has created many deft watercolours of her beloved flowers, our ‘Mixed Bouquet’ as an excellent example. The sparse use of colour, vacant portions of paper, translucency and minimal depictions of background offer an intriguing view of the gentle passage of time, the inability to hold onto anything for long, and of the responsibility we have to appreciate fleeting beauty: these petals will fade, the leaves will fall, the water will discolour, the perfume will wane - but here and now it is all beautiful and this fact lives on forever. Artist Jack Shadbolt, a frequent visitor at the Lambs’, noted that Molly’s mother was passionate about gardening and loved flowers. The inspiration to record the beauty and extravagances of everyday life might well be rooted in the passion she found for it in her childhood home. As she told the CBC in 1993:

“I love flowers. Poppies [are] like crowds; they move in the wind. You don’t organize them. You don’t settle them into something. You paint them as they are, blowing or moving or dying or coming to birth and that is how it is with my crowds. I see something and it is spontaneous and it’s moving and it’s about the movement of something like crowds and colour or flowers and colour.”

Molly Lamb Bobak, C.M. O.N.B. (1922-2014) was born near Vancouver, British Columbia. She joined Canadian Women's Army Corps (C.W.A.C.) in 1942, became lieutenant and was appointed the first Canadian female Official War Artist. She went overseas to Europe with the Canadian Army in 1945-46 and in 1945, she married Bruno Bobak, himself an outstanding artist. Strongly influenced by Matisse and Cézanne and other Impressionist and modern masters, Bobak’s mature work combined the formal elements of structural organization and colour, subject and formal technique into an aesthetic unity.

Molly taught painting from one end of the country to the other - at the Vancouver School of Art (1947-50), at University of British Columbia Extension and Summer Schools (1958 -1959), at the University of New Brunswick Art Centre (1960), the Banff School of Art, the Sunbury Shores Arts and Nature Centre and the Alberta College of Art. She managed to maintain her career in the conservative context of her era when it was harrowingly difficult socially and logistically for a wife and mother to do so, particularly while also moving frequently and living far from a family support system.