WELCOME to KASHUBE ART !! July 2, 2009

The nature scenes painted by longtime artist Kenneth F. Glofcheskie Sr. have been coined as ‘Kashubism’ due to the fact that many of the locales depicted are strikingly similar to that rugged part of the Baltic coast in N. North West Poland near Gdansk known as the Kaszuby region, a beautiful area full of lakes, salmon streams and gorgeous forests.

Mr. Glofcheskie’s forefathers settled in the Madawaska Vally of Ontario in the early 1900’s and founded one of the first Polish communities in North America, Wilno, as well as nearby Barry’s Bay. Many of the immigrants worked in the lumber industry felling trees in an area that bore many of the characteristics of their beutiful homeland. Mr. Glofcheskie continued the family tradition and started working in his father’s lumber camp during the summer at the age of twelve. Following the completion of high school he worked full time in the Madawaska Vally and in famed Algonquin Park, the same park that inspired so many of Group of Seven artist Tom Thompson’s paintings.

For the following forty plus years Mr. Glofcheskie worked in various aspects of the logging industry always in the bush developing an intimate relationship with his element. For him though a tree was always more than just a subject like a piece of fruit in a bowl, it was a living entity that he had to look at from many different perspectives.

This ideal has been extended to his art work where he has painstakingly paid attention and detail to the trees he portrays. With just a dash of surealism his forest scenes are almost dreamlike in their appearence but deep and as if you are actually standing in the bush yourself. He also gives the same attention to his representations of log cabins, mills or lakes.

Very few artists have ever lived and worked so closely with their subject matter as has Mr. Glofcheskie and this is why his work carries an uniquie cachet that can’t be had except by decades of close contact with his subject matter through work and latter as a master angler. You can put a good artist in the bush and he can probably crank out some decent work but he will never actually ‘feel’ the subject matter to the same extent that someone with Mr. Glofcheskie’s inimate relationship with the woods of Algonquin Park and the Madawaska Valley can. Even at the age of 74 Mr. Glofcheskie still likes to get out in a boat and give some walleyes a bad day, still observing and contemplating our beautiful lakes and forests from the unique perspective that only a lifetime immersed in such a wonderful wilderness can allow.

Mr. Glofcheskie represents the last of a generation of artists with this kind of hard earned resume and the chances are that we will never again see the same style and vision as offered in the works of artists such as Mr. Glofcheskie. This is your opportunity to own a piece of truly unique Canadiana at a more than reasonable price.

 

 

 

Advertisements