Canvas Of War

From the vaults of the Canadian War Museum comes this selection of 110 seldom-seen images from the First and Second World Wars, drawn from a collection that includes nearly 13,000 paintings and drawings chronicling Canada`s military history. Some of the country`s finest artists--including A.Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer, Mabel May, Fred Valey and later Alex Colville, Charles Comfort, Pegi Nicol MacLeod and Jack Shadbolt--recorded Canada`s experience of war from battlegrounds in the air, on land and at sea, on the homefront and abroad. Interwoven here with a compelling text, these works of art present a rich, varied and personal view of Canadians at war. While the images poignantly illustrate battle-weary soldiers capturing Vimy Ridge, fighter aircraft streaking across the open sky, desperate sailors drowning in choppy waters, euphoric, flag-waving crowds celebrating the armistice, military and art experts Dean Oliver and Laura Brandon explore the significance of the events, and unveil the political intrigue and strategic planning that took place behind the front lines. In concise and lucid prose interspersed with excerpts from the artists`and soldiers`own accounts, the authors reveal the links between Canada`s experience in both world wars and the country`s social, political, economic and artistic revolution. For those interested in art, in history and in the Canadian experience of war, Canvas of War is essential reading.

The Canadian War Museum possesses one of the finest twentieth-century official war art collections in the world. Until relatively recently, however, the collection has received limited public attention. In Art or Memorial?, author Laura Brandon explores some of the reasons why this may have been the case. At various times throughout its history, the war art collection has receded from and re-emerged in the nation's collective consciousness. Nevertheless, as an invaluable part of the official record of war in Canada, it is profoundly significant. Brandon argues that the value of the collection lies less in its artistic merit and more in its role as a site of memory. Art or Memorial? seeks to illuminate Canadian war art's sometimes-hidden presence in the nation's memory and to show, through both its presence and its absence, how it helped to shape, and will continue to influence, how we remember as a nation.

Long before cinema was invented, people went to picture shows. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain, Europe and America they were treated to dramatic pictorial spectacles. Audiences might be encircled by vast 360-degree canvases, or seated before continuous images drawn across a proscenium, or gathered in amusement parks to watch painted 3-D structures come 'alive' with the explosion of fireworks overhead. The sense of realism was enhanced by back-lighting, running commentaries and props such as real sand and trees. Canvas Documentaries captures the artistic, civic and social preoccupations of the times. Generously illustrated with paintings, etchings, engravings, mechanical drawings, architectural plans, photographs and advertising material, this beautiful book is a window on the vibrant popular culture of the Victorian era.

From Word to Canvas: Appropriations of Myth in Women’s Aesthetic Production is an innovative collection of essays on female aesthetic production and myth, examining the ways in which women artists and writers utilize myth to negotiate their perceptions of feminine identity and feminine representation in an increasingly complex and culturally hybrid world. The featured essays and artistic contributions address a variety of contemporary female productions, including literature, performance, and visual art, in a markedly global scope. Representing a wide range of cultures, languages, geographic locales, and social contexts—from Jewish-Hindu and Kenyan-German, through Irish, Italian, American, to Vietnamese folktales—this diversified selection underscores the agency of “the feminine gaze” across a historical and geopolitical span, a gaze through which myths from various cultures and different cultural amalgams speak to us with force and with significance. The potency of this gaze is linked to the potential of myth simultaneously to encompass and compress history, and to offer the result as a backdrop against which the move from word to canvas—or from a mythic tale to its aesthetic appropriation—is performed in female aesthetic production.

Fast moving and guaranteed to evoke all emotions, the nine chapters of Off the Canvas takes the reader from the depths of the Great Depression, through the days of segregation and Jim Crow, then into World War II and to the events of today. These are the recollections of Tony Petrovic, former middleweight champion of the world. At that time there was just eight divisions and one sanctioning body, and his brother Billy, a welterweight champion, The book describs their rise to the top of the boxing world, only to have Billy gunned down by a racist assassin. Off the Canvas will provoke laughter, tears, anger, hate and understanding. It is a work of fiction that is so historically correct, it actually could have happened. Although historically correct, Off the Canvas is a fictionalized account of two brothers, whose lives are intertwined until the tragic death of Billy, the younger of the two. We are taken through this history and these events by older brother, Tony Petrovic, who, at age 80, doesn’t recall as well as he should, but is able to express himself in such a way that once into Off the Canvas the reader will not want to put down this novel till its completion.