BRITISH COLUMBIA ARTISTS  

Letter from Paul Goranson

To Vancouver Art Gallery Director J.A. Morris

Information provided courtesy of the Vancouver Art Gallery Library


128 Monroe St., #7
New York, N.Y.
Feb. 19. '50

Mr. J.A. Morris, Esq.
Director, The Vancouver Art Gallery
Georgia St. West, Van. B.C.

Dear Mr. Morris,

The work for my exhibition has been forwarded on to you and should reach you by about the middle of this week. Because of the weight limitation on parcels mailed to Canada I was required to make two packages and, on the enclosed exhibition list, have indicated which prints are in either package.

The twenty-one prints selected for this show are those which I thought best representative of my graphic work in 1948 - 1949. I've excluded the most recent ones as they are in a slightly different direction and I wished to keep the exhibition more or less consistant.

I understood that you wish me to include a few biographical notes -. I received my initial training at the Vancouver School of Art and at the B.C. College of Art in 1933 and 1934 under F.H. Varley. From 1935 until the war I worked in conjunction with Orville Fisher and Edward Hughes on murals and print-making with a brief period of teaching at the Vancouver School of Art. Among the murals done during this period were the Malaspina Hotel murals, those in the First United Church and the San Francisco World's Fair murals for the B.C. Pavilion. Was commissioned as a war artist in the R.C.A.F. and served from 1941 to Sept. 1947. Saw service in Canada, England, North Africa, Italy, France, Belgium, Holland and Germany.

With the desire to study at firt hand the modern trends in painting and to become familiar with the latest contemporary graphic techniques I applied through D.V.A. for courses at the Art Students League of New York where I am now completing those studies.

Beside mural paintings am represented in the National Gallery with war paintings and have prints in the New York Public Library, International Business Machines Corp. collection, Vancouver Art Gallery, Brooklyn Museum, N.Y., Lawrence Museum, Mass., and Paine's Collection, Boston, Mass.

I wish to thank you for your interest in permitting me this opportunity to show some of my work in the Vancouver Art Gallery. I hope that it hasn't been inconvenient to you in having the show postponed from January. Last December I suggested to my wife of having an exhibition sometime in the spring but was unprepared to have one at such an early date.

The prints have been insured for a very low value to facilitate them entering Canada and I hope there will be no hitch at the customs to cause undue delay in their delivery.

Respectfully yours,
Paul Goranson

p.s. George and Alice Swinton
        have asked me to extend
        to you their very best regards.
            P.G.



HOME