Warm Pub

Private Collection, Ontario Heffel Fine Art, auction, Toronto, 17 May 2012, lot 85 Mayberry Fine Art, Winnipeg Private Collection, Winnipeg

Michelle Gewurtz, “Molly Lamb Bobak: Life & Work” [online publication], Art Canada Institute, Toronto, 2018, reproduced page 22 Joan Lowndes, “Canadian Art Magazine”, vol. 20, no. 6, page 321

With an expert hand, Molly Lamb Bobak captures a bustling scene inside a cozy pub where light dances off of the surface of the bar and the mirrored glass behind the figure of the barkeep. This work is one of a series of works the artist completed of pub interiors during her time in London in the 1950s and 1960s. Despite the dark interiors of the old pubs, Bobak creates an inviting tableau. Joan Lowndes summed it up when she wrote that, “Only the figures in the foreground are silhouetted, in a heavier, more emphatic line and in new, high-keyed red orange. They recede into mere ovals, then into a haze of off-white and pink, which we readily translate into cigarette smoke, chatter, joviality ... Molly Bobak powerfully projects an atmosphere.” This atmosphere is at the root of Molly Lamb Bobak’s work.