Provenance:

Private Collection, Quebec.

Literature:

William Kurelek, Someone With Me, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 1973, front cover, reproduced.
William Kurelek, Someone With Me, Niagara Falls Art Gallery, Niagara Falls, Ontario, 1986, title page, reproduced; pages 253-254, 523.

Note:

Featured on the original front cover of William Kurelek’s 1973 autobiography (and moving to the inside title page for later printings of the book), “Someone With Me” was chosen as the title of artist’s story, the phrase carrying great importance for Kurelek.

In 1950, hitchhiking and travelling by foot, Kurelek, then a self-described atheist, began a journey from Edmonton to San Miguel, Mexico, interested in attending the School of Fine Arts. After stays in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, the artist, unable to find a bed for the night, decided to go without sleep and walk through the Nevada desert until the morning. The temperature plummeted and, after beginning to feel drowsy, Kurelek decided that “freeze or no freeze”, he would “chance lying down for a sleep or at least a rest. I crawled under one of those useless-looking road bridges which are only for flash floods and, pushing aside some thorns with my hands, lay curled up on the bare ground…Whether I fell fully asleep I don’t know, but suddenly I was aware that there was someone with me. He appeared to be a person in a long white robe and he was urging me to rise. ‘Get up,’ he was saying, ‘we must look after the sheep or you will freeze to death.’ I obeyed and set off at a near run down the road shaking violently from the chill. Presently I noticed that the sheep crowding before me had become nothing but those ragged fluffs of mist floating across the road. And the other person beside me had somehow blended into me and was gone.”

Underscoring the personal importance of the phrase, Kurelek closes his autobiography with “what I am sure of, however, is that I am not really alone anymore in the rest of my journey through this tragic, puzzling, yet wonderful world. There is Someone with me. And He has asked me to get up because there is work to be done.”

This lot is accompanied by a 1973 copy of William Kurelek’s autobiography, “Someone With Me”, in fair condition.