Artist and Editor LIVE!

On May 8 at noon, join New Brunswick’s most celebrated artist, Bruno Bobak, and curator and editor, Bernard Riordan, at The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, 1723 Hollis Street, Halifax for a lively and evocative discussion about the eighty-year-old artist’s career and a curator’s passion for it. For more information, contact WFNS at 423-8116 or email: talk@writers.ns.ca.

“Art is one of the major expressions of humanity,” Herménégilde Chiasson writes in his introduction to Bruno Bobak: The Full Palette, and since Bruno Bobak first discovered his art in a Saturday morning art class at the Art Gallery of Toronto he has been a master at exploring that humanity in his work.

During the Second World War, Bruno Bobak became Canada’s youngest Official War Artist. It was during the war that he met Molly Lamb, whom he later married. In 1947, he became head of the design department at the Vancouver School of Art (now the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design) and began showing his work in national and international exhibitions. In 1960 he was appointed as Artist-in- Residence for a one-year term at the University of New Brunswick and returned to Frederiction for good in 1962 as director of the University of New Brunswick Art Centre. Today, Bruno Bobak’s paintings, drawings and prints hang in major collections in Canada, the United States, the UK, Poland and Scandinavia.

Bernard Riordon, the editor of Bruno Bobak: The Full Palette, became the founding director of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in 1975 and has built it into a public gallery of national stature. He received the Order of Canada in 2002 and was appointed director of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in 2003.