Loch Gallery is pleased to present Through Brush & Spirit: The Legacy of Illingworth “Buck” Kerr, an exhibition that pays tribute to the remarkable legacy of one of Alberta’s most influential landscape painters. This exhibition and sale will feature a selection of works from the Terra Capital collection in Calgary, alongside pieces from private collections across Alberta.
Opening Reception: February 1 from 1:00 to 4:00 pm with a talk by Writer/Curator Mary-Beth Laviolette at 2:30 pm.
We must realize that basic talent is not enough.
That technique and knowledge of materials is not enough.
The essence of painting is distilled from personality. [i]
—Illingworth Kerr, unpublished 1968 lecture, Norman Mackenzie Gallery, Regina, SK
No more definitive words could have been spoken when Buck Kerr delivered this observation a year after retirement. Formerly the Head of the Alberta College of Art (now Alberta University of the Arts) from 1947 – 1967, Kerr was now a happy retiree. Keen to impose his own artistic “personality” on the southern Alberta landscape—an area that, except for Group of Seven member, A.Y. Jackson, had been thoroughly overlooked by Canada’s most celebrated landscape artists. Not by Kerr, though, who—now able to paint full-time—was about to set the record straight. Who could blame him? As an art student in Toronto (1924 – 1927), he remembered well Arthur Lismer’s dismissive remark about prairie telephone poles being the only thing worth painting. Born and raised in Saskatchewan, Kerr knew in his heart this was not true—a lifelong point of view expressed in many of the works in this collection.
From the beloved Qu’Appelle Valley, where he had grown up, to his later life in the foothills and front ranges of the Rockies, Kerr captured many familiar scenes. There were the inspiring vistas of southwestern Alberta, finely represented in Ranch South of Priddis, Alberta—a major work once included in the Edmonton Art Gallery’s 1985 retrospective Harvest of the Spirit. Add to that the Diamond Valley area, shown in Turner Valley Hills, which Kerr returned to seasonally, and the agrarian countryside so richly described in Creek West of Millarville, Prairie Towers and the plein air Threshing - Study. There is a sense of his knowing every western nook and cranny.
Other subjects enticed as well. Alpine landscapes, which both frustrated and rewarded him, became an attraction in his later years, especially as expressed in the cool colours of First Snow, Kananaskis and the starry illuminations of Lake O’Hara Nocturne, Late September. Alberta’s early ranching heritage is evoked in The Creek at John Ware’s, Millarville, while later paintings of Saskatchewan’s striking Qu’Appelle Valley couldn’t help but stir memories of Kerr’s eight hard years in Lumsden, Saskatchewan. There, in a studio above the local pool hall, the young art graduate attempted to support himself with harvest work, trapping, sign painting and meagre art sales.
Several paintings in the Terra Capital collection, measuring 12 x 16 inches, were undoubtedly painted outdoors, en plein air. In other words, Kerr’s immediate impressions of the landscape captured the spirit or essence of a scene—the reflective and atmospheric Prairie Slough, Evening and Yellow Mountains near Bow Summit, with greens, blues and ochres applied in broad brush strokes.
Kerr’s use of colour was also an interpretative act. In Harvest of the Spirit, exhibition curator Maggie Callahan noted, “Kerr has been called an habitual painter with purple.”[ii] She refers to paintings rendered in a muted palette, like the yellows and purples of the aforementioned Ranch South of Priddis, Alberta, and the heavy nocturnal shadows in Superstition Mountain, Mesa, Arizona. Credited with being a modernist rather than a descriptive realist, Kerr focused on the mood of a place as he experienced it.
The Terra Capital collection covers the 1970s and 1980s. Although indebted to the boldness of the Group of Seven, whom Kerr knew in the 1920s, by the time he reached his senior years, he was recognized for a personal style honed, especially during these important decades post-retirement. It was a time when the former instructor and administrator could finally live off his art. In 1973, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Calgary, followed a year later by his nomination to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. In 1975, the University of Alberta recognized his contribution to the province with a gold medal. Later, The Edmonton Art Gallery organized a touring retrospective, Illingworth Kerr: Fifty Years a Painter. In 1982, Kerr was awarded the Order of Canada.
This was also a period of travel, shared with his wife, Mary Spice Kerr, whom he married in 1938. She is represented in this exhibition by her plein air oil on panel, Autumn Yellow. The American southwest was a big attraction; while the couple sketched and painted in Arizona, Utah and California, Kerr completed his autobiography, Paint and Circumstance, which was published a few years before his passing. Reflecting on what he had learned over sixty years of painterly effort, Kerr wrote, “Most gratifying was an assurance that the sense of Western space and its magic moods which had always obsessed me had successfully been captured. Not as I often dreamed and hoped for, but still gratifying. [iii]
In this collection at Loch Gallery, on view are some of those moments Kerr strove so diligently to understand and express.
Mary-Beth Laviolette, January 2025
[i] Callahan, Maggie. Harvest of the Spirit: Illingworth Kerr Retrospective, The Edmonton Art Gallery, 1985, p.5
[ii] Ibid., p.44
[iii] Kerr, Illingworth. Paint and Circumstance: Illingworth Kerr, published by Jules and Maureen Poscente, Ralph Hedlin, Heidi Redekop and William H.Hopper (Calgary: 1987) p.153
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