101.6 x 121.9 cm
Further images
Inscriptions
signed, ‘MOLLY LAMB B’ (lower right)Provenance
Galerie Walter Klinkhoff Inc., Montreal
Acquired from the above by Property of a Distinguished Montreal Collector
The studies and inspiration for this important painting is the visit of Princess Anne to Hartland, New Brunswick in 1986. It is Molly’s paintings of crowds for which she is most famous. Bobak sees these events as aesthetic experiences. She is fascinated by the dynamic nature of a crowd which is never the same from one moment to another. She is preoccupied with giving order to the sense of perpetual movement and change.
Crowds and flowers are beautiful for similar reasons: the spontaneity of their ordering and disordering.
Molly Lamb Bobak loves to paint crowds:
“It is an interest I have had ever since I was a kid. I simply love gatherings, minglings, not so much sports although I used to love going to baseball games and seeing crowds. I think that I rationalize it - this is really true - I have been thinking about this and I say that it’s like little ants crawling, the sort of insignificance and yet the beauty of people all getting together.” [1]
Molly Lamb Bobak loves both flowers and crowds. She explained in an interview with 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.” [2]
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Footnotes:
[1] Ian G. Lumsden, The Queen Comes to New Brunswick: Paintings and Drawings by Molly Lamb Bobak (Saint John : Beaverbrook Art Gallery, 1977), 8.
[2] Molly Lamb Bobak: a retrospective, https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2414705964
Interview for Touring exhibition retrospective organized by the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina.
