William Kurelek: Carpenter’s Dream

one of Canada’s most popular and idiosyncratic 20th century artists, Kurelek resisted ideas of artistic exceptionalism and genius.

A self-identified “picture maker,” William Kurelek saw himself as a modern medieval illuminator, someone who “wasn’t so awfully conscious of art or of being an artist.”[1] Kurelek’s choice of subject matter, his scratchy, illustrational style, betray indifference for the refined elegance and conventional beauty associated with artistic creation. Yet, Carpenter’s Dream is not without aesthetic concern; it reveals the picture maker’s deep reverence for the more earthy charm of manual craftsmanship.

Raised in agrarian communities in Alberta and Manitoba, Kurelek came by his aesthetic values honestly. In his youth he struggled under the practical, farm-forged expectations of his Ukrainian-Canadian parents. Yet, his mature work—his paintings as well as the renowned picture frames he crafted for his own work (including Carpenter’s Dream) and that of other artists at Toronto’s Isaacs Gallery—demonstrate a consistent unfussy skillfulness, dexterous handiwork, and artisanry. These qualities first appeared in the shallow spaced, closely observed, and meticulously rendered trompe l’oeil arrangements of coins, keys, and stamps Kurelek painted while living in England in the 1950s. Through the first half of the 1970s, he rediscovered an interest in the mundane work-a-day objects of his youth on the farm, as well as the singular tools with which he made his frames.

At first glance Carpenter’s Dream appears consistent with small contemporaneous works like Frame Finisher’s Glove or The Blacking Brush (both at the National Gallery of Canada). Closer examination, however, reveals something more whimsical: small figures performing—one is actually skiing!—amid the curled shavings that lend the wood plane its mountainous proportions. While the narrative has been lost, it’s likely this painting was a gift or commission, perhaps for Stephen Klemchuk (1915-83), a Montreal-based supporter of Kurelek in the 1970s, whose name appears on verso. On one level an icon to the craftsmanship Kurelek valued, Carpenter’s Dream, on another, counts among a much smaller body of strange, playful dreamscapes—The Dream of Michael Negrich (Winnipeg Art Gallery) and The Dream of Mayor Crombie in the Glen Stewart Ravine (City of Toronto), for example—reflecting personal connections to specific people in his life.

[1] William Kurelek, quoted in Joan Murray, Kurelek’s Vision of Canada (Oshawa: Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 1982), 71. William Kurelek, Someone With Me: The Autobiography of William Kurelek (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Center for Improvement of Undergraduate Education, 1973), 503-4.

We thank Andrew Kear, Head of Programs at Museum London, for this essay. Before his role at Museum London, Kear was the Head of Collections and Exhibitions and Curator of Canadian Art at Winnipeg Art Gallery. He has written for Canadian Art, Border Crossings, and the Art Canada Institute.

About the Auction

Our major fall Fine Art auction includes important works by Group of Seven artists Lawren Harris, A.J. Casson, J.E.H. MacDonald, and A.Y. Jackson, a rare Jock Macdonald abstract, early Kazuo Nakamura paintings, Louis-Philippe Hébert’s major sculpture Algonquins, as well as striking works by Sorel Etrog and Walter Yarwood. International highlights include two exceptionally rare sketches by Sir Edward John Poynter for the Maison Dieu’s stained-glass windows in Dover, Alexander Calder’s Red Serpent, along with works by David Diao, Jules Olitski, and Gene Davis.

Bidding Available November 7 – 20, 2025.

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