A short profile of the life and work of the artist William Kurelek 1927–1977

“One cannot make oneself believe. One can only open one’s arms to receive the gift.”

Grace is a gift from God. But often it is not given until someone has fallen into utter darkness over and over again, until he is so humbled by life that there is nothing left to do but cry out for help. Canadian artist William Kurelek suffered chronic depression so severe that he tried to commit suicide. To help him, his doctors gave him shock treatments—14 of them. Kurelek said it was like being executed 14 times over, an experience so horrendous it made him realize how helpless he was.

That’s when he started praying.

This is the story of William Kurelek, one of ’s best-known and most beloved artists, and how his conversion to Roman Catholicism inspired him to create “The Passion of Christ,” a series of 160 paintings based on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew, and one of the greatest religious works of the 20th century.

The son of Ukrainian immigrants, he was born in 1927 and grew up during the Great Depression, on the . He knew from an early age that he was an artist, but his father, Metro, a harsh disciplinarian who was contemptuous of his high-strung, imaginative son, wanted him to be a doctor. Metro expected him to run the family farm, something for which Kurelek had neither the interest nor the physique. Kurelek suffered because of his parents’ old-world attitude that children should be punished if they were afraid, or ill, or made mistakes, and should not be shown affection. Because of this treatment, Kurelek quickly learned to hide his feelings from other people. His terror of his father cut him adrift from his family. His mother never interfered with his father and as a result, when Kurelek left home, he became estranged from both his parents for several years.

From this unhappy beginning, Kurelek set out to become a professional artist. He tried to satisfy his father by graduating from university. While there, he became what he called “intellectually proud” and, from being an agnostic, became an atheist. After university, he went off to study art at the College of Art in , then travelled down to where he hoped to work with the social realist artists then famous. But there was no one there of the calibre he needed. He then set his sights on , with two purposes—to finish his schooling in art and to find a cure for his chronic depression. He worked in the bush in Ontario and as a lumberjack to earn the money for the journey by cargo ship. But once in England, the self-hatred and self-pity he had been suffering became so incapacitating that he checked himself into Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital in .

He was seen immediately by a doctor there, but soon a panel of doctors decided his case could best be handled as an out-patient. He reluctantly found lodgings near the hospital and saw a psychiatrist twice a week. But he could not communicate his feelings to them and lived in a painful emotional state he described as a stalemate: he desperately needed help but could not express what he needed, and so his doctors did not understand what he was telling them. In his spare time, he visited the Tate Gallery where he first saw William Blake’s paintings. He also travelled to to discover the masterpieces of European art—he saw ’s altarpieces, Brueghel’s paintings of peasant life and the macabre allegories of , each of which had a huge influence on his own paintings. He returned to England after a few weeks and found lodgings in London, determined to paint for a living. He completed three paintings and felt he had arrived as a productive artist. But otherwise he was going downhill fast. He didn’t think his doctors realized how close to a breakdown he was and he wanted desperately to get their attention. He cut one of his arms, though only superficially, with a sharp razor blade. It worked. He was quickly re-admitted as an in-patient to Maudsley and began to use paintings as part of his therapy.

It was here that he met Margaret Smith, an occupational therapist, who obtained art supplies for him. She also gave her own time, an hour at the end of every day, so Kurelek could talk over what was on his mind. He found himself looking forward to her visits. When he discovered she was a Catholic, he teased her about it, since he was still a staunch atheist. But he noted that there seemed to be an aura about her, something that secured his total confidence. Was it her Catholicism? He became curious about her faith and asked her questions about it. When she couldn’t answer his questions, she brought him pamphlets. In one of these he read about the Catholic practice of praying for others. He asked her if she was praying for him, and she answered simply, “Yes, I am.” Shortly after, he was transferred to Netherne Hospital, which took more serious cases. He and Margaret wrote to each other and she visited on her days off. He felt that he was in love with her but she could see what he really needed was motherly affection. By drawing the line at physical passion, she taught Kurelek that there was something stronger than human love—the love of God.

Important as it was, this relationship also made him see that he wouldn’t find any relief burdening Margaret, or anyone, with his problems. He didn’t want to use anyone as a “wailing wall” any longer. Kurelek realized he had exhausted all human resources and he turned to the only possibility left—religion. This realization came after an extraordinary experience at Netherne. He awoke in the middle of the night and became aware of a sense of complete abandonment. For the first time he tried to pray to God. But no matter how he tried he couldn’t communicate. Soon after this experience, he painted “HELP ME PLEASE HELP ME PLEASE HELP ME—PLEASE HELP,” and “The Maze,” a depiction of his troubled mind, both obvious cries for help. Incredibly, his doctors still didn’t respond to his desperation. He was so miserable then that he decided there was no God. And if there was no God, there was therefore no after-life, and suicide was a reasonable thing to do. He decided to take matters into his own hands. This time, he took eight pills and cut his face and arms with a razor. He was found by an attendant. Over the next few months, he was given 14 treatments of electro-convulsive therapy, “shock” therapy.

But it was the breakthrough he had craved. “Sometimes,” he said, “Sorrow remarries a person to God." These experiences were so horrendous that he resumed prayer and never stopped. But the shock treatments had worked—though he was physically dazed and shaky for a few weeks afterwards, they lifted his crushing depression and he became cheerful when they were over with. The paintings he had done before his shock treatments, culminating in “the Maze,” had been a way of emptying his mind of his fears, anxieties and horrors. Once he had done that, he went through a period of darkness, a sort of transitory state of mind. Now that he had emptied himself, he could receive. After a few months of the shock treatments, he was released from Netherne and felt confident enough to try living off the sale of his paintings. That this was possible was another proof that his new life in Christ was the right one. Now touched by grace, he determined, with excitement and enthusiasm, to give Christianity every chance to prove its points. He plunged into the study of religious and philosophical arguments for and against Christianity, so he could make sure “the wool wasn’t being pulled over my eyes.” But he also believed that “one cannot make oneself believe. One can only open one’s arms to receive the gift.”

In 1957, he returned to Canada for a summer visit and to get away from Margaret so he could discover his true feelings about her. When he returned to England a few months later, he asked her to marry him. She said “No,” very firmly and explained he didn’t need her as a crutch any longer. Her rejection was the final step in his conversion—he was afraid he had only been interested in the faith to please her. He knew now it was for himself.

Now the tug of war between his intellectual resistance and his spiritual needs finally bore fruit. Four years after his first talks with Margaret, he was received formally into the , remodelling his life on a day-to-day, God-centred pattern. His torment was over. He was a new person. His life was finally moving towards sanity and wholesomeness. After seven years in England, it was time to come home for good.

Kurelek made his way back to Toronto in 1959 and within a few months had a one-man show at the Isaacs Gallery. But he also wanted to thank God for his new life and by the time he had come back to Canada, he had already decided what he was going to do. Fra Angelico said, “To paint the things of Christ, one must live with Christ.” After his conversion, Kurelek set himself the artistic task of painting The Gospel According to St. Matthew as an offering of thanks, not only from being an atheist to being a committed Roman Catholic, but from a life of intense suffering to one of accepting and celebrating life. Although he became famous for his nostalgic paintings of life in western Canada in the 1930s and 1940s, what Kurelek really wanted to do was to focus on religious paintings that illustrated the Bible. He started the series of paintings called “The Passion of Christ” for this purpose.

Originally he had intended to create paintings from every sentence in St Matthew, but that would have taken many years. Instead, he painted 160 works, starting with The Last Supper. He visited the Holy Land twice to gather material so he could study the terrain Jesus knew, how people lived, their facial features, their expressions—everything that would make his paintings real to viewers. But he also used his own time and the landscape of his father’s farm in Manitoba to illustrate the scenes in the paintings. He began his masterpiece on New Year’s Day 1960, promising God he would do a painting a week for three years until he finished, an incredible pace. When he completed the series, Kurelek felt he had reached the pinnacle of his artistic and emotional expression. As he was working on it, he presented the series to Mykola and Olha Kolankiwsky, who had opened a small art gallery in Toronto. They were so inspired by the paintings that a few years later, in 1971, they bought all 160 paintings and built the Niagara Falls Art Gallery & Museum in Niagara Falls to house them. The paintings can still be seen there today.

Kurelek had always hoped that these paintings could be made into a film and had organized each composition into a very camera-conscious arrangement of images so that the drama unfolded naturally and the paintings flowed from one image to the next. This did not happen during his lifetime, but many other honours followed, as Kurelek settled into a productive life as a successful artist. He and Av Isaacs came up with the idea of publishing books of Kurelek’s paintings. Some of these, such as A Prairie Boy’s Summer, A Prairie Boy’s Winter and A Northern Nativity became Canadian classics, selling over half a million copies altogether. These books secured Kurelek’s place in as a painter of the Canadian way of life. Other one-man shows followed and interest in his art increased.

In 1962 Kurelek married Jean Andrews. She respected his talent and encouraged him in his art, and his marriage added to his sense that his life was moving along the way he wanted it to. These years were successful and happy ones for Kurelek. He sold 90 percent of his paintings, all over the country. He and Jean had four children, one adopted. He had a home in the city and a summer home and he was financially secure for the first time in his life. However, he was not the easiest person to be with. Jean confided to friends that “Bill might be a saint but he was difficult to live with.” She spent many lonely evenings by herself at home while Kurelek lived away from home for weeks at a time, holed up in a hotel, painting up to 18 hours a day. He would often lose 10 pounds during these expeditions and donated the money he saved from not eating to charity. He produced up to three paintings a day this way.

By the early 1970s, Kurelek was Canada’s most interviewed and written about artist. In 1973, he received a gold medal for A Prairie Boy’s Winter, a book that has won more awards than any other book published in Canada. He also won the New York Times' Best Illustrated Children's Book Award and the Canadian Association of Children's Librarians Illustrators Award. During a visit from Queen Elizabeth, Kurelek and Jean were invited to a state dinner with then Prime Minister Pearson, where one of Kurelek’s paintings was presented to the Queen.

His most famous works, the illustrated books, such as A Prairie Boy’s Summer, A Prairie Boy’s Winter and A Northern Nativity, have delighted and inspired over half a million readers. All these books depict children, Kurelek’s way of finding worth in himself by idealistically reliving his childhood. In 1977, Kurelek made a painting journey to the Ukrainian village where his father had grown up, searching for his Ukrainian roots. He painted everything he could—the farms, the village, the surrounding area, the activities, and the artefacts. He returned home fatally ill with cancer—probably the result of paint fumes from working in poorly-ventilated studios over many years—and died at the age of 50 a short time later. An outstanding artist from whose paintings shone emotional intensity and his awed wonder at the world, Kurelek left a legacy of over 3000 works.

Four years after his death, Kurelek’s intention of having “The Passion of Christ” series made into a film was also realized. Toronto filmmaker Philip Earnshaw became a collaborator of the artist, interpreting Kurelek’s directions from the way he had painted and organized the paintings. In Earnshaw’s intelligent use of camera angles and lighting, the specially composed music and the powerfully reverent reading of the Biblical text by actor Len Cariou, Kurelek’s dream for his paintings has been brilliantly fulfilled. The film has garnered many awards and commendations from film festivals as well as from different churches, ranging from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Vatican.