Vancouver Harbour

Roberts Gallery, Toronto Private Collection, Ontario

Alan C. Elder and Ian Thom, A Modern Life: Art and Design in British Columbia, 1945-1960, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2004, page 113

A celebrated war artist during the Second World War, Bruno Bobak gained his artistic training through this experience, working from photographs as reference and honing his skill with other war artists. After the war, he married Molly Lamb Bobak, a fellow war artist and later moved to Vancouver in 1947. There, he took a teaching post at the Vancouver School of Art from 1947-1957 and continued to develop his landscape practice. Similar to artists like Goodridge Roberts and Alan Collier, Bobak's landscapes have a flattened approach and border with abstract experimentations of form. “Vancouver Harbour” showcases the effects of light from the setting sun, executed in a mosaic-like patterning of the paint strokes. The scene is approached from a high vantage looking down over the harbour, likely from Confederation Park looking West with Burnaby Heights to the left of the composition and the Maplewood Flats Conservation Area to the right, the railway bridge straddling Burrard Inlet. Punctuated with bright cadmium blue, teal and yellow, the setting sun at the centre of the composition acts as a certain guiding beacon for the ships in the inlet and cast a a near spiritual glow over the Vancouver landscape below. Scott Watson writes that these cityscape's break from Bobak's traditional rural landscapes and are “luminous and ecstatic, brimming with bright colours that distance their work from the grey-scale genre.”