Lucy Jarvis: Even Stones Have Life

Writing early in 1962, Lucy Jarvis said she felt “just at the threshold of beginning.” Jarvis had studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in the 1920s, later becoming part of the social realist movement, committed to an art “of the people.”

In 1941, Jarvis co-founded the UNB Art Centre with Pegi Nicol MacLeod, and together they turned it into a place of creative effervescence.

In the 1960s, she left the art centre and headed for Paris and immersed herself in Parisian life. However, she retreated to Pembroke Dyke near Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, during the summer months.

The influences of both impressionism and post-impressionism emerged in her work, and her paintings became more boldly colourful, freer — more completely her own.

Lucy Jarvis: Even Stones Have Life is the first examination of Jarvis’ considerable body of work — what she painted, how she rendered it, and how her art permeated her life and vice versa.

• Author: Roslyn Rosefeld
• Goose Lane Editions, 2016
• 256 pages, hardcover