AUCTION Westbridge Fine Art Auction House / Canadian and International Art Sale

Canadian and International Art Sale

Auction CurrencyCAD Auction Location1737 Fir Street, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

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Canadian and International Art Sales June 2005 Sunday June 5, 2005

Canadian and International Art

Sunday June 19, 2005

A special single-artist exhibition

Sonia Cornwall: Visions of the Cariboo

Sunday, June 19 at 2pm.

Sonia Cornwall (Canadian, 1919 - ):



Sonia was born in 1919 in Kamloops, B.C. the daughter of a property agent, travel guide, writer and one-time officer in the RCMP. She grew up on the Onward Ranch, an 11,000 acres cattle ranch in the Williams Lake area, and took an interest in art at an early age. A close friend of many prominent painters including A.Y. Jackson, who visited the Onward several years in a row during the 1940s, Sonia managed to break away from her ranching chores for a few months in 1946, seven years after her father died, and went to Calgary to study art at the Provincial Institute of Technology. However, for the most part she is a self-taught artist who took every opportunity to study and learn colour and technique from visiting artists such as Molly Bobak, Joe Plaskett, Herbert Siebner, Takao Tanabe and Jack Hardman who were all part of a University of British Columbia Extension Department Outreach Program. A devoted mother and wife, and an active ranch hand, Sonia always found a little time to paint until her family was grown and she was able to concentrate more fully on her passion.

Sonia's work is fresh, unabashed, and emotional. It is not derivative. It cannot be labeled. And while there are hints of other painters such as A.Y. Jackson, and David Milne, the style is singularly that of a painter with a strong sense and understanding of life - its humour and its hardships - and the grandeur of the vast Canadian landscape that presents itself throughout the Cariboo region of British Columbia. It is the style of Sonia Cornwall.

Sonia's loose, sometimes impressionistic, but always bold and confident brush strokes capture the vastness and uniqueness of the Cariboo with clarity and effect. Her colours are rich, brash, ranchy! And her images are memorable. They possess a wonderful sense of space and movement: the skies move, the hillsides move, the cattle and horses move – some with pleasing artistic license as with the head of the lead horse in The Auction. 

There is also a certain ethereal quality running throughout her work, a sense of tranquility and comfortable solitude. And yet, at the same time, it is a documentary of a region, a people, a way of life that most of us only ever experience from the outside.

Sonia Cornwall is an in-your-face painter. She pulls no punches. It's real, it's there, it's the Cariboo, it is life on the ranch painted as only a true pioneer, a life-long resident, and a sensitive and talented artist could paint it. And it is great stuff!

Sunday June 26, 2005

End of Season "Tried & New" Auction

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2001 - Sonia Cornwall - Reflection of the Artist in the

Westbridge Fine Art Auction House

Artist: Sonia Cornwall Medium: Oil on panel Size: 12" x 16" Signed: Lower left and dated '02; signed, titled an...

Bidding Has Concluded

Estimate : 800.00 - 1,200.00

Sold to floor for 650.00

Canadian and International Art Sale

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