The information provided can be used as a finding aid for further research and additional research sources - sometimes it is enough to simply know that a publication or organization existed in the first place - or the various pages can simply be read for interest and enjoyment of the history of Vancouver. It would be impossible to completely list all artists and all associated information, and apologies are due to any artists not included in this compilation who should should have been listed. The editor would appreciate any additional information the readers may care to provide, or to have errors pointed out for correction in subsequent editions.

This compilation of reference material is one of the results of my years of research into the life and times of Vancouver artist Maud Rees Sherman. Her artistic exhibition career was extensive, and spanned more than fifty years. My interest in her started when I purchased one of her watercolours at an auction in 1996. The auctioneer had piqued my interest when he noted that she had been a student of Frederick H. Varley, one of the Group of Seven.

I decided to "look her up", and see when and where she had taken classes from Varley. This turned out to be much, much, harder than I could have possibly imagined, and my search for biographical information about her eventually spanned a number of years, and still continues. I was not suffering alone with this problem.

The difficulties of finding information about early Vancouver and British Columbia artists were plaintively noted by Tippett and Cole in Art In British Columbia - The Historical Sources, their 1974 article in B.C. Studies Number 23, where they commented "There is a paucity of source material available to the historian attempting to recreate British Columbia's past", and "Written sources ... are even scarcer." They further noted that "Personal correspondence, that mainstay of historians, is deplorably rare", and that many exhibition catalogues had apparently become lost.

The few art historians working in this field, notably Evelyn de Rostaing McMann, were unable to find complete runs of exhibition catalogues even by major arts groups such as the B.C. Society of Fine Arts and the Island Arts & Crafts Society, and were not able to find even a single catalogue at that time for the Vancouver Sketch Club and the Palette and Chisel Club.

Thirty years later the situation has improved in some ways, and degenerated in others. Many more books, pamphlets, and exhibition catalogues have been written, and institutions such as the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Vancouver City Archives have slowly increased their holdings through donation and acquisition. On the other hand, many people involved with the early arts in Vancouver have passed away, their estates dispersed or even discarded in some cases. The break-up of such estates has slowly filtered original material into the collections of institutions and private collections, including my own, but much was also thrown out - and a complete picture has still failed to emerge.

The information I gleaned during my own search ended up filling many feet of shelves, binders, and file drawers with original exhibition catalogues, photocopies of catalogues, notes regarding such exhibitions, and collateral material. I found myself rummaging through my collection over and over, looking for little bits of information. I began to dream of an exhibition database, into which I could simply type queries and get immediate answers. Computerization was the answer, it seemed, but more questions were raised. What sort of database would it be? How would it be created? How would it work?

I mentally wrestled with ways of making a masterful yet simple interface, with elegant and semi-automated data and information entry tools, capable of producing a wide range of information arranging, linking and output. In the end I settled for plain old HTML text editing, utilizing web technology. It turned out that the information matrix I wanted to create was very easy to represent by HTML files, with the added advantage of those files being easy to create, edit, and update. The format could be simple yet elegant, with excellent cross-linking of information.

The basic format of information was that found in art exhibition catalogues: title of artwork, name of artist, medium of artwork. Further to this, the exhibition typically had a title (Annual Exhibition) and a sponsoring group (PNE). Additional information could include sales price, if any; entry number in the exhibition; and comments ("from the collection of ... "). Further information about artists and exhibitions is included in the form of transcribed articles, reviews, and columns. These give interesting colour to the otherwise bare facts presented in the indices.

What was interesting about building artist biographies like this was the way that the artists slowly emerged from the jigsaw puzzle of information - when and where they painted, the subjects they preferred and the people they knew, the groups they joined and the exhibitions they were in - slowly bringing their personalities into focus piece by piece as additional information was added to each artists file.

During Christmas break 2002 I finally started working on the basic formatting of the project, and began inputting the information. At first I predicted I would be listing as many as four or five hundred artists. The list grew to six hundred, eight hundred, then twelve hundred. The number of exhibitions grew by leaps and bounds, names of artists groups leapt out of the pages of history from all directions. Each exhibition catalogue coded into html files would cause dozens of other files to be created, as I struggled to not only code links to all relevant information but to create or update the files that were being linked to.

By early May 2003 I had created over 320 web pages, comprised of 220 artists biographies and 100 pages of exhibition catalogues, clippings, society pages, and lists of artwork. The total collection of web pages printed out to just under 500 pages at that time. It began to feel like I was producing something substantial.

Four months later, the project had slowly grown to 570 web pages, 420 biographies, and printed out on over 800 pages. Changing the layout slightly to avoid excess effort, I gave up on listing all of the artwork alphabetically by title, and trimmed as much excess coding as possible. By January 2004 I had created almost 800 web pages, listed 1,400 artists, written 600 biographies, transcribed 30 exhibition catalogues and listed 2,500 paintings. Many additional sources of information were either indexed or completely transcribed. The printout of the project was now a pile of 1,200 sheets of paper in 3 large D-ring binders, and I decided that it was time to begin making the information available to others. I finally felt that I had risen to Tippett and Cole's challenge at the end of their article on the historic sources: "Culture may be last but it should not be the least realm for the historian of the province."

One year later the project was significantly larger, and was nominated by the Librarian of the Vancouver Art Gallery for the 2005 Melva J. Dwyer Award, a prize awarded annually to "the creator of an exceptional reference work on Canadian art and architecture". The prize, however, was awarded on April 3 2005 to the National Gallery of Canada for their Index to 19th Century Canadian Art Catalogues. Regardless, input continued on my project, and by mid-April 2005 there were 1,044 web pages listing 1,760 artists, with 818 biographies compiled. Over 310 exhibitions were listed, and 59 catalogues transcribed detailing 4,477 paintings. Numerous arts groups were added, and many more reference works listed. The printout of the project reached 1,600 pages.

Sales of the project, and donations to institutions willing to give a tax receipt, began in January 2004. Little effort was made to market the project, as input continued, but by April 2005 there were over twenty owners of the project, ranging from the National Gallery to the Vancouver Art Gallery, various universities and special collections, as well as auctioneers, appraisers, and collectors. Reviews were uniformly positive, and excellent support was gratefully received from many arts professionals.

By April 2006, despite a reduction in the amount of time spent adding information to the files, the project expanded to 1,288 web pages printing out on 2,000 pages. Additional transcribed exhibition catalogues brought the total number of artworks listed to over 6,400. More than 1,000 artists had files of their own, and many more reference books, pamplets, and exhibition catalogues were listed.

By that time the project had been nominated for three awards, and received favorable reviews in ARTichoke magazine (Summer 2004) and B.C. History (Vol 38 No. 4, 2005).

In 2007 the project continued to slowly expand as another 64 files were created, and hundreds more were updated with additional information. A complete printout totalled over 2,100 pages. Almost 7,000 paintings were listed. The effort was continued to transcribe all B.C. Society of Fine Arts exhibitions.

By March 2008 another push to add information increased the number of files by 133. Another 11 exhibition catalogues were transcribed, adding over 1,100 more artworks to the index, as well as many more artist biographies. Supplemental information continued to be added with numerous references and clippings. In Release 1.24 (July 2007) images were finally added to the project, and in Release 1.25 (March 15 2008) more were added for a total of 60 images of artworks and reference material. Incremental Release 1.25a (May 1 2008) added another 67 files and a range of additional images (17 more), references, clippings, and one more exhibition catalogue listing 254 artworks.

A number of years have passed since this file was last updated. The ongoing list of "what's new" in the dozens of upgrades since 2008 show the massive amount of information that has been added in the past eleven years. The project has been nominated for six awards, and received a Certificate of Merit from the B.C. Historical Federation. The National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives received a large donation of books from the BC Artists collection, and mounted an archival exhibition in 2018 based on the donation complete with exhibition catalogues and a web site for the show.

The collecting of books, catalogues, art, and ephemera related to BC visual artists also continues. Ongoing research at the Vancouver Art Gallery Library and Archives uncovered another one hundred early exhibition catalogues. Adding those to BC Artists has been one of the main activities on the project recently.

UPDATE MARCH 21 2020

Another year has passed, another massive amount of information has been added to BC ARTISTS. This was partly enabled by my retirement in June 2019 from working full time in architecture, allowing me the luxury of time to keep pecking away at exhibition catalogues, biographies, and occasional papers. Information is regularly collected for the project, and much still awaits being referenced.

In December 2019, after a lot of consideration, I decided to post the entire project ON-LINE for free public access. Selling or donating copies of the project was taking up quite a bit of time, resources, and money. It took a bit of work to make it available, as all files had to be named in lower-case letters, and every internal hyperlink also had to be named in lower-case letters. A friend helped with this, finding a program that could selectively do such revisions, and after a week or so of mucking around with that, including a couple of false starts, the deed was done.

It is now quick, simple, and free for me to upload new and revised HTM and JPG files, enabling all users access to the current and complete version of the project. I "put the word out" and the news was shared by the Vancouver Art Gallery Library & Archives (2,600 people read that tweet in ONE DAY), the BC Historical Federation, Illustrated Vancouver, the BC Alliance for Arts & Culture, and the Alcuin Society. For some reason the local news providers have pretty much ignored the project, despite my efforts to contact them, so I am pretty much ignoring them in return.

BC ARTISTS now includes 3,600 web pages, and over 1,000 images. More than 19,700 visual artists are indexed, and 1,745 of them have biography files. 215 exhibition catalogues are fully transcribed, listing over 16,000 artworks.