Red Deer’s Paul Boultbee comes by his artistic aspirations honestly.
His family tree includes more than 20 practising artists, including some quite renowned painters.
This includes John Boultbee (1753-1812), a favourite of King George III’s of England. John’s painterly depiction of “the father of animal husbandry,” Robert Bakewell, in the saddle, hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London.
Paul’s great-great-grandfather, Michael Hannaford, who was born in England but died in Toronto in 1891, was one of the original Royal Canadian Academy of Arts members from 1880.
Another creative ancestor was Alfred Boultbee (1864-1928) who documented in watercolour sketches the Klondike Gold Rush and Yukon landscapes.
Nearly a century later, their descendant Paul Boultbee came to Red Deer from Ontario in 1982 to work as a librarian at Red Deer College. He’s now retired and concentrating full-time on his art.
He admits he was rather taken aback, while leafing through his genealogy, to discover such a wealth of artists in the family. “It made me think that some of the talent I might have is legitimate,” he said.
His exhibit, The Boultbee Project, at the Red Deer Museum and Art Gallery, shows how the art of his forebears inspired Boultbee, who distilled and interpreted these ancestral works with his own more contemporary style.
Beside Boultbee’s minimalist canvases hang prints of the more detailed historic family work that inspired them. Some of these mixed-media works in this hallway exhibition were completed as part of Boultbee’s studies to obtain a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Thompson Rivers University.
Viewers can see how the basic shapes in Hannaford’s realistic Waterfall painting from 1881, were distilled by Boultbee into a modernist collage that uses different textured paper to create and rocky abstract landscape and sense of distance.
Similarly, a 1955 painting of Toronto’s High Park, created by his first cousin, Rosamond Longfield-Smith (1904-1994), inspired another of Boultbee’s sparser compositions.
‘I was thinking, what do I want to do with this, what do I want to emphasize?” recalled Boultbee. He ended up incorporating the shape of a foreground tree from his cousin’s painting in his own abstract work, as well as lines copied from an 1800s map of High Park.
Another of his canvases that uses pieces of broken porcelain was jointly inspired by a china plate painted by his great-grandmother, Edith Hannaford Boultbee (1861-1921) in 1891, and a quirky watercolour painting of fish in a fridge created by his second cousin Leslie Boultbee in 2003.
Boultbee, who will have new works inspired by other ancestors shown at the museum in November, said he knew from a young age there were painters in the family. “I saw several large oil paintings hanging in my grandmother’s apartment in Toronto when I was five or six…”
When he was a little older, he heard a story that had been handed down in the family: An unnamed ancestor had to leave the village of Boltby in North Yorkshire centuries ago, “in troubled times,” to move 200 miles south.
Whether the trouble was political or religious strife is unknown. What is known is that this ancestor was a basket maker — the first in a long line of artisans and artists in a family that’s included shoe and glove makers, ceramic painters, photographers, print makers, painters, architects and sculptors.
The Boultbee Project will be showing until Dec. 3.
lmichelin@reddeeradvocate.com
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