Skaters on the Saint John River

This artwork was painted c. 1983. The painting has recently been reframed. The framed dimensions are 26.5 x 34.5 in.

It is signed in the lower right corner on the front and on the verso. It is also titled on the verso.

The painting was purchased at Gallery 78 in 1983.

“Molly Lamb Bobak” by Cindy Richmond, in Molly Lamb Bobak: A Retrospective, published by MacKenzie Art Gallery in 1983 -

 “Of the various subjects she paints, Molly Lamb Bobak is perhaps best known for her crowd scenes. These dynamic paintings record public events as aesthetic experiences. They are not intended as records or memorials to important events, though some of them are; nor is her intention to analyze the political or social or psychological character of the crowd in the manner of someone like Elias Canetti. For Molly crowds are interesting because they pose an endlessly aesthetic challenge, and also because they embody a dynamic and anarchic principle of life to which she is powerfully drawn.”“In her earliest crowd scenes, (...) the crowd is very close to the front of the painting and consequently very static. (...) In her later crowd scenes, the figure of the crowd is much smaller, and seen at a much greater distance, inhabiting a vastly larger and nearly static space within the picture frame. This allows Molly to convey the sense of the crowd as an entity moving through space, a being with its own movement and vitality and life.”

“Movement is the central aesthetic challenge of the crowd scenes, but, as I noted above, Molly’s interest in crowds is more than merely formal. She also sees in crowds a beauty and a vitality that she finds emotionally and psychologically compelling, a feature they share with flowers. Molly evidently finds crowds and flowers beautiful for similar reasons - the apparent spontaneity of their ordering (or disordering) principles. They are never the same from one moment to the next and so pose a constantly fresh and exciting range of problems for the artist.”

“Joe Plaskett has said of her crowd paintings: “Art is her life and her expression. Her oils of people in crowds suggest an expansive, even extrovert spirit. Life is celebrated as a carnival - the pulse of life is beating, the game is being played, the drama is enacted.”