Molly Lamb Bobak
Summer Flowers
1920-2014
Oil on board
16 x 24 in
40.6 x 61 cm
Copyright Alan Klinkhoff Gallery
40.6 x 61 cm
Sold
Further images
Inscriptions
signed, ‘MOLLY LAMB B’ (lower left); titled, inscribed and signed, ‘ ‘SUMMER FLOWERS’/ 24 X 16/ Molly Bobak’ (verso)Provenance
Private collection, Town of Mount Royal, Quebec
Molly explained on 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.”[1]
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.
“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.”[1]
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.
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Footnote:
[1] Molly Lamb Bobak: a retrospective, https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2414705964
Interview for Touring exhibition retrospective organized by the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina.
