Interior

Galerie Walter Klinkhoff, Montreal Private Collection, Boston

Michelle Gewurtz, “Molly Lamb Bobak: Life & Work” [online publication], Art Canada Institute, Toronto, 2018, page 37

Molly Lamb Bobak attended the Vancouver School of Art and flourished under the tutelage and encouragement of Jack Shadbolt, her teacher. Shadbolt would become a lifelong artistic mentor and friend. His most significant impact on her work would be his teachings on the relationship between shape, form and space within the picture plane, and how they work together to create meaning. Despite this theoretical grounding, Bobak was devoted to the empirical world around her. She was an expressionist painter with a firm footing in reality. Bobak’s interior paintings suggest a personal connection with the room she depicts, and hint at the lives of those who inhabit them. Typically, the artist featured a large bouquet of flowers, which acted as the focal point of the composition - the flowers serving as a proxy for the absence of figures. Despite the serene, static nature of “Interior”, Bobak has applied an energy to the way in which the objects are arranged within the configuration of the room. As Cindy Richmond observed of Bobak’s interior compositions, “They had psychological significance for their creator, some connection to particular emotions or experience.”