| BRITISH COLUMBIA ARTISTS |
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BRUSSELS, Dec. 12 - Capt. Orville N. Fisher of Vancouver
is one of three Canadian Army artists exhibiting in the first show of war pictures
painted in the front line, now showing in the Palais des Beaux Arts at Brussels, one
of the world's most noted art galleries. This is art with a difference. The three men who made these sketches and water colors were subscribing to no school of painting. They were interpreting what they have lived since D-Day in Normandy in all its grimness, horror, tragedy, and sordidness. Since June 6 Capts. Fisher, W.A. Ogilvie of Montreal and George D. Pepper of Ottawa and Toronto, have had the front line for their studios. The story of Fisher, Vancouver-born mural painter, is typical of the others. He drove from the Canadian front in Holland to see the exhibition in a jeep with a shrapnel hole through its windshield. The jeep was scarred by battle, partly the result of a bombing in which the artist was caught along the Falaise road last August. Fisher landed in Normandy on D-Day, four hours after H-hour, with the 3rd Canadian Division. "And I am proud to be with them," said the handsome young painter in the battered battledress. "I hate to be here in Brussels away from the division. They are part of me now, and I am going back as soon as I can." Fisher was sketching in the Falaise pocket last August, with the German lines less than 100 feet away, when his driver, Pte. Leo Carpentier of Edmonton, who had been scouting around, came in with seven German prisoners. "I had to stop sketching to disarm the guys," said the artist. |