PROVENANCE
Acquired directly from the Artist by a Private Collection, Edmonton
By descent to the present Private Collection, British Columbia

LITERATURE
William Kurelek, A Prairie Boy's Winter, 1973, a similar work titled Snowball Weather reproduced front cover and with chapter 18, unpaginated

In this delightful painting by William Kurelek, an expansive white field is punctuated by the brightly coloured outerwear of schoolchildren as they carve out meandering tracks across the snow. Snowball Weather is nearly identical to the painting chosen by the artist for the cover of his best-selling and award-winning children’s book A Prairie Boy’s Winter. It vividly captures the spontaneous eruption of activity inspired by the discovery of perfect packing snow at recess. In the artist’s own words, writing in the third person:

Then, not even hockey could hold the attention of William’s schoolmates. Everyone wanted to make snowballs. Sometimes a snowman was made, but that was thought to be kids’ stuff. Competition and marksmanship were the thing. The children threw as far as possible to knock each other’s hats off, or they organized sides—if anything that came so naturally can be called organization—for a snowball war.

This iconic painting exemplifies the artist’s symbolically rich Prairie mythology at its most exuberant. Kurelek shows us that despite the harshness of Canadian winters, we too can witness and hold onto fleeting moments of profound whimsy. Snowball Weather enters the market from a private collection for the first time in several decades.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars