Kurelek is in the middle of a really interesting career shift right now (came back from the retrospective at the AGH), his rep as an illustrator of small town semi rural prarie stuff has swung onto an understanding of him as a visionary religious painter--but work that does not fit into either of those spaces (mostly the still lives and the landscapes) or work that does not fit into the narrative where he got better and went from Bosch to Brughel (the abortion work from the early 70s) is left behind; i think that he did so much work, and work that carried a large variety of emotional responses, mean that we have trouble absorbing one contradiction without narratizing it, two is too much.

I have read and thought about Kurelek for years, and thot i had a general overview; but even this narrative supprised me, this time a half dozen super tight landscapes from 74 to 77, including a grey and black night time scene of a winnipeg flood and a hitchhicker in winter both no more than a foot or so long; and these four trompe d'oilel paintings from 1959 of currency and other paper ephemera, (in the middle of the paintings done in london hospitals

that's kind of the point--i keep thinking that his compoistion got better in the 70s, the tumbling point of view vistas, the radically stripped down quality, the less is more minimalism about it--but its not better, its different--his most visionary work edges towards kitsch, but it pulls back just enough--he can paint himself in the middle of a composition as a dead rat, or the mayor taking money from a factory of abortion doctors, or dogs eating all of christ but his hands and his crown, or a painting with an atom bomb and a crucifixon and it works; but he can also paint the smallest tightest, loneliest painting of saskatchewan highways; or the funeral of a child, and have that work--or he can paint a prarie landscape that is mostly trees or fields or lake instead of cliches of big sky, or these paintings of fields that work somewhere towards reinhardt or noland.

i went with two painters--gary and victoria, who were great company, and they reminded me of the composition of them, how difficult they were (there were some drawings, but a photographic practice was hinted at in the didactic panels but not repro'd in the catalog, and his graphic works were not shown at all, and his drawings were vastly under rated)

i think i am going to email the hamilton curator and ask about some of the abortion issues.