Young Canada Games

This painting was created in 1985. It was purchased in 1985 by the current owner at Galerie Walter Klinkhoff. It is signed in the lower right.

The painting is framed in the original frame from 1985. The framed dimensions are 11 x 17 in.
From the JEUX DU CANADA GAMES website -

"In 1985, New Brunswick welcomed Canada to Saint John for the 10th iteration of the Canada Games. Having lost out on the opportunity to host the 1977 Canada Games to St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, the 1985 Bid Committee ensured that they would not be passed up again. Steve Fonyo, the courageous runner who ran across Canada to raise money for cancer research, along with local field hockey player Brenda Guitard came together to light the Games flame.

A $15 million investment was spent to build new sporting facilities for Saint John, giving the city's athletic communities a big boost. A new aquatic centre, a new stadium and track, as well as new soccer fields, softball facilities and track and field stadium are all part of the lasting impact of the Games."

“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.”