The dark, clear sky is deep blue-black, the moon hangs high and lonely. Stars twinkle silently over four kids on a rink. In fields of snow, alone in all that vastness, they live in a painting by Peter Shostak.
Shostak was a resident here for many years, and his paintings of carefree kids shovelling snow or choosing teams in a back lane have earned him a following. His illustrated history of the Ukrainian settlement of sa国际传媒鈥檚 prairie provinces, titled For Our Children (Yalenka Enterprises, 1991), will assure his place in posterity. That聽book is based on a series of聽50聽paintings, and reproductions of many of them are part of the聽Royal sa国际传媒 Museum鈥檚 current聽display celebrating the 125th聽anniversary of the arrival of聽Ukrainians in sa国际传媒.
A comprehensive showing of 25 original canvases that Shostak created in recent years, and several of his finest silkscreen prints from earlier times, are on show at Victoria鈥檚 West End Gallery. West End鈥檚 Edmonton gallery has represented Shostak鈥檚 artwork for more than 30 years, but, surprisingly, this is the first time he has had a solo show in Victoria.
Shostak was born in 1943 to parents who immigrated from Ukraine. He spent his youth on their farm 16 kilometres north of Bonnyville, Alta., a place with only four hectares cleared for farming on what was at that point mostly virgin land.
The road came in 1948, and with the arrival of electricity in 1955, things changed for the Shostak family. In sixth grade, Peter bought his first set of oil paints with money made selling bubble gum to schoolmates and, with no formal art instruction available, he experimented on his own with painting and drawing.
Fair-haired, tall and well-built, Shostak must have been his parents鈥� pride. Enrolling at the University of Alberta in 1961, he studied in the Faculty of Education and taught junior high school in Alberta. In 1969 he came to the University of Victoria where he became associate professor of art education, a position he held until 1979. Then he decided to devote all his time to art, for Shostak had found a calling 鈥� to record the life that had been all around him as a child.
He illustrated the necessary tasks of farming: picking rocks out of the fields, cutting wood for fuel and bringing in the cows. But he spent more time painting games played by children in more innocent times 鈥� tobogganing, scrub baseball or simply wading in puddles.
Shostak鈥檚 signature subject is hockey, as it was played out-of-doors on homemade rinks. His most recent book, Hockey Under Winter Skies (Yalenka Enterprises, 2000) is a veritable treatise on the subject.
Back in 1973, Shostak began a photographic survey of the remaining Ukrainian pioneer buildings in the Smoky Lake area of Alberta. Subsequently, he combed the local archives, interviewed elders and travelled the countryside making an inventory of remnants of prairie history.
He even travelled to Ukraine a few times during the Soviet era, and has been back again in recent years, for the story begins there. Before the First World War, an estimated 200,000 Ukrainian pioneers arrived in sa国际传媒, known by many names: Bukovynians, Ruthenians and so on.
Shostak鈥檚 research resulted in a series of 50 large paintings illustrating what he had learned. He published them in For Our Children, with an extensive and absorbing text drawn from first-person accounts of pioneers. Shostak was awarded a Queen鈥檚 Golden Jubilee Medal in 2004, and in 2014 the Shevchenko Medal 鈥渇or his outstanding contribution to the arts and the development of聽the Ukrainian Canadian community.鈥�
For immigrants, 鈥渋t鈥檚 so much easier today,鈥� Shostak remarked. In his parents鈥� era, a settler might be left off on the rail line and head north with about $7 left in his pocket.
鈥淭here are still topics that I haven鈥檛 touched on yet,鈥� the artist said. 鈥淲ater: the well. It was key to have good water supply. A lot of them, when they started out, were looking at ponds, but they had to get wells.
鈥淭oday you can drill 100 to 150聽feet. When I was growing up, 30 feet was deep. It was hand-dug; they were letting a guy down on a little setup. He鈥檇 dig away, and now and then they鈥檇 bring up a bucket of what he dug. This continued for a long time.鈥�
I reminded Shostak that, when he was developing as an artist, abstraction was everything, and the inclusion of subject matter in paintings was heretical, but Shostak doesn鈥檛 hide his narrative tendency. When I mentioned that the prairies have given us William Kurelek and Alan Sapp, 鈥淚 can relate to them,鈥� he told me.
There is more to Shostak than a look back at prairie life in the 1950s. With his wife, Geraldine, he moved from Victoria to Courtenay in 2005, and began to spend more time at their place on Hornby Island.
Scenes of Little Tribune Bay began to appear, showing Shostak in a more relaxed mood, painting the landscape without quite so much story line. Happy families on the beach and a skiff bobbing at the tideline present a softer, sunnier West Coast world.
This long-awaited show is a collection of Shostak classics, looking back on a successful and useful career.
Peter Shostak, West End Gallery, 1203 Broad St., 250-388-0009, , until Sept.聽22.
