| In 1905, Illingworth
Holey Kerr was born in Lumsden, Saskatchewan. One of
four children born to William Hugh and Florence (nee
Nurse) Kerr, he grew up in the small prairie town. Kerr
always felt a close association to animals and began
drawing them at an early age. His mother painted in
watercolour and encouraged him to draw and paint and in
1919, 14 of his works were entered into the Regina
Exhibition and all won awards.
In 1923, the young Kerr headed
east to get an art education and after a brief session
at Central Technical School in Toronto, enrolled at the
Ontario College of Art. His teachers included Arthur
Lismer, Frederick Varley, J.E.H. MacDonald and William
Beatty. Kerr knew that C.W. Jeffrey’s had painted in
the Lumsden area and he enrolled in his illustration
class his final year at OCA. A month after classes with
Beatty in landscape painting in his final year, Kerr
returned to the prairies which reminded him that despite
his many travels, he would always remain a
dyed-in-the-wool Westerner.
Kerr traveled home via Banff
and visited the studio of Carl Rungius. Returning home
to Lumsden, he rented a studio above the pool hall and
operated a trapline to earn money so he could continue
to paint. Working from oil sketches, Kerr created some
of his most famous canvases including When Winter
Comes, in the collection of the Alberta Foundation
for the Arts, and Western Theatre, in the
collection of the Glenbow Museum.
Introduced to the works of
James Henderson and Augustus Kenderdine at an exhibition
in Regina, Kerr also met Campbell Tinning. He continued
to paint completing Flood, Lumsden Saskatchewan
in 1931 and Straw Stacks, March Thaw (Glenbow
Collection) in 1935. This, possibly his best-known
prairie painting, symbolizes the culmination of eight
years of drought, depression and frustration on the
prairie. It was at this time that he burned much of his
early work and set off for England.
Settling first in London in the
spring of 1936, he began working on documentary films
and enrolled at the Westminster School of Art. He spent
time drawing the animals in the London Zoo and travelled
to Scotland to visit filmmaker and friend, Jenny
Gilbertson. It was at this time also that he met Mary
Spice who was visiting from Yorkton, Saskatchwan.
Friendship blossomed into a romance and they were
married in 1938. They left for a Paris honeymoon,
travelled southern France and boarded a Cunard ship
bound for Montreal in 1938.
The Kerr’s settled in
Montreal where he began to work with other artists on
projects to represent Canada at the New York World’s
Fair. This completed, Buck and Mary headed back to
Saskatchewan settling in Lumsden in 1939 where Kerr was
invited to have his first retrospective in 1940 at the
Regina College Gallery. They gradually made their way to
British Columbia, settling first in White Rock, then
Cultus Lake and finally in Vancouver. He continued to
paint, exhibited often, and joined the BC Society of
Artists and the Federation of Canadian Artists, which,
art that time, was chaired by Lawren Harris.
Kerr began to teach at the
Vancouver School of Art in 1946 while Jock Macdonald had
gone to Calgary to head the Art Department at the
Provincial Institute of Technology and Art. After one
year, he announced he was leaving for the Ontario
College of Art and asked Kerr to apply for the position
and in August, 1947, the Kerr’s headed for Calgary.
Kerr’s twenty years as Head
of the Art Department at the Provincial Institute of
Technology and Art (later to become the Alberta College
of Art) are well documented. Marion Nicoll, Stanford
Perrott, Luke Lindoe and Stan Blodgett were teaching at
the Institute at the time. Kerr became a director of the
Calgary Zoological Society and an associate director of
the Calgary Stampede as soon as they settled in Calgary.
Kerr also made charcoal drawings as studies for the
portraits he was commissioned to paint, portraits of
such important Alberta figures as then Lieutenant
Governor Grant MacEwan, Harry Strom and J.C. Bowan.
In 1959, Kerr was awarded a
Canada Council Senior Fellowship to travel to the United
States and Great Britain to visit schools that offered
industrial design and they travelled by car to
Minneapolis, New York and up the east coast to Boston.
They then went on to London
where Kerr enjoyed a studio and painted regularly.
The Kerr’s travelled to
Munich, Venice, Florence, Rome, Barcelona and Madrid
before returning to London and then back to Calgary.
Illingworth Kerr retired from
the Alberta College of Art in 1967. He was now free to
draw and paint full-time. He did many portraits of
political figures and in 1973, he was awarded an
Honorary Doctorate from the University of Calgary. Two
years later, in 1975, a large-scale retrospective
exhibition of his art was presented at the Alberta
College of Art Gallery. (The Gallery was to be renamed
the Illingworth Kerr Gallery in September, 1990, to
commemorate the artist.) The retrospective was also
shown in Regina and Saskatoon. To avoid the cold Alberta
winters, the Kerrs traveled to St. Lucia, Arizona, Maui,
Barbados, Jamaica and Mazatlan.
Mary Spice Kerr died in 1982
and Kerr continued to paint, perhaps even more now than
before. In 1986, he and his sister, Evelyn Laverne,
travelled to Fiji, New Zealand and Maui. His most recent
major retrospective, Harvest of the Spirit, had
already opened in Edmonton and was travelling across
Canada on an extensive nine-city tour.
By 1987, Dr. Kerr was becoming
concerned with his ill health and began to put his
affairs in order. It was at this time that some five
hundred drawings and sixteen sketchbooks were slated for
donation to the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery. In
the same spirit, his library went to the Alberta College
of Art. He continued to travel and to paint and draw as
long as he was able and, on January 6, 1989, Dr.
Illingworth Holey (Buck) Kerr passed away leaving a
lifelong legacy of art behind him. |
