Untitled (Bristol Floating Harbour)

Celebrated Canadian artists Bruno Bobak and his wife Molly lived and created in Europe during the period 1957-1961. In 1957, Bruno won a Royal Society Canadian Government Overseas Fellowship, which enabled him to give up teaching in British Columbia and paint full time in Europe. It was also during this year that the couple's daughter Annie was born.

While in Europe, Bobak met with artists and attended exhibitions of Turner and Monet whose techniques in landscape painting influenced his oeuvre. Bobak was also fascinated with the expressive painting of Oscar Kokoshka and Edvard Munch.

This painting features a view towards a stone bridge with moored boats on both sides of the harbour and a Union Jack flag being flown on the historic St. Mary Redcliffe church tower.

Bobak has chosen blocks of pink, chartreuse, yellow, blue and lavender in the sky and in the water to emphasize atmosphere. This expressive painting style is the artist's signature from that era.

The subject of the painting coincides with the artist's location in 1962. Bobak held a notable solo exhibition at the City Museum and Art Gallery in Bristol, England. This show coincided with a number of other prestigious UK solo exhibitions, including at the Leeds City Art Gallery (Feb–Mar 1962), the Kaplan Gallery in London (1962), and the South London Art Gallery (1963).

The painting is framed by a linen liner with a gold inside liner and a gold, ornate wood outside moulding. The outside framed dimensions are 35 x 53 in.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY - 

Aged 20 and just out of art studies at Central Technical School in Toronto, Bruno Bobak made an impressive debut as a professional artist. Having enlisted in the army, he submitted a watercolour to an army art exhibition, won first prize, and was appointed as an official war artist in 1943. From then on he was included in important exhibitions and galleries in Canada, the United States and abroad with opportunity to travel, explore, and broaden his creative experiences.  It was during one such study trip to Europe that news arrived of his appointment as artist-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick in 1960.  It was to be only a one-year stay in Fredericton, but it turned out to be a lifetime. From 1962 until his retirement in 1987, Bruno Bobak was director of the UNB Art Centre.  

In Fredericton, in the 1960’s, from his studio on the campus of the university, Bruno Bobak produced some of his most vital figurative work - large canvases of life-size figures aggressively yet tenderly depicted in a dripping mix of paints, jarring colors and great sweeping gestures of expressionism. Within the relative isolation of New Brunswick, Bobak found himself in an environment and setting which afforded him the mental space and physical opportunity to do and say what he needed in his art.  It culminated in a major touring exhibition, Bruno Bobak's "Humanism", which toured the Atlantic region in 1971.  

But Bruno Bobak's art has never been limited nor confined to a single subject, medium, technique, style or vision.  A consummate craftsman, he is equally adept at drawing, watercolors, printmaking, oil painting, mural-making and sculpture.  With ingenuity and imagination he also designed and planted vegetable and flower gardens, reinvented uses for discarded industrial materials, designed and decorated his house, and fashioned his own furniture.  Such diversification reflected his strong background in design at Central Tech.  In the 1950’s he would head the design department at the Vancouver School of Art.  Subjects for art-making also varied: landscapes, figures, portraits, still-life, flowers, vegetables, street scenes, harbours, and buildings.  Interestingly, in terms of style, Bobak later returned to his stark realist style of earlier years.  Textures became smooth and flattened, colors patterned, the palette heightened in tone, and the structure of compositions more consciously designed and ordered. 

Bobak won numerous awards and prizes, among them a Canada Council Senior Fellowship and the Queen Elizabeth Medal; the 1954 Jessie Dow Prize, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; the 1955 C.W. Jeffreys Award, Canadian Society of Graphic Art; Honorable Mention "First Exhibition of Drawing and Prints", Lugano, Switzerland; the K.B. Baker Memorial Purchase Award "Forty-First Annual Exhibition of North West Artists", Seattle, Washington; the 1957 Prize, Monsanto Art Competition, Montreal; Royal Society Canadian Government Overseas Fellowship.  In 1982 his painting "Campus Gates" was chosen for a Canada Post stamp, representing New Brunswick in a block of 12 stamps of all the provinces and territories.  In 1998 Canada Post featured a work by Bobak for its 90-cent stamp in the "Masterpieces of Canadian Art" series.  He designed the New Brunswick Bicentennial Medal in 1984, and in 1985 was commissioned by Parks Canada to create an original multiple of a New Brunswick scene (Martello Tower) for presentation to the Governor General Madame Jeanne Sauve.  Bobak was presented with an honorary degree (LLD) from Saint Thomas University in 1984 and was awarded a DLit from UNB in 1986.  In the autumn of 1995 he received the Order of Canada for his unique and lasting contributions to Canadian Art and for fostering artistic and cultural life in New Brunswick and Canada.

Bobak's work is part of major public gallery collections across Canada, among them the National Gallery of Canada, the Candian War Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and in Fredericton, the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, the University of New Brunswick, and the Provincial Art Bank.  His paintings are included in countless prestigious corporate and private collections. His work is very well documented in numerous publications, including “Bruno Bobak: The Full Palette”, published in 2006 by Goose Lane Editions and the Beaverbrook Art Gallery.