Email to a friend Printer friendly Font: * * * * “I took my last two years of high school at Technical Collegiate, where I had the good fortune of being enrolled in an art class taught by Ernest Lindner,” says Roy. “Even though Mr. Lindner had exhibited in New York and other major centres, his innate humility and his empathy for young students were constants of his generous personality.
He became my idol.” Roy was also influenced by Winona Mulcaster at Saskatoon Teachers’ College, George Swinton, the first curator of the Saskatoon Art Centre, Gordon Snelgrove, the dean of fine arts, and E.E. Nowicki, a visiting professor, at the University of Saskatchewan. Roy became a teacher at the Canadian Forces base at Cold Lake, where he considered himself “a Sunday painter.” Out of his love of art, however, came a series of Christmas cards.
It was his brother Frank’s cataloguing of the cards that led to the decision to publish the book. The first card, a linocut, was made at his farm home in Tullis in 1945, and he admits the style and technique were of a beginner’s nature. The 1946 card, Snowbound, and the follow-up product, Prairie Snowdrifts, revealed some of the Lindner teachings. The first 11 were done in the linocut medium. The next 25 were serigraphs or silk screen prints.
The next nine were reproductions of earlier original works, which embraced pen-and-ink, oil and acrylic. The last five were works he designed on computers. His life in Meadow Lake and Cold Lake opened visual blessings. Forty Below, done in 1965, recalls a calm, dark and frigid night at Cold Lake, where the exhaust from hundreds of gas furnaces rises high and straight into the blue-black depths of the sky.