Lucy Jarvis: Even Stones Have Life Hardcover - 2016

Lucy Jarvis. A gifted artist. A devoted educator. A woman of strong convictions who produced an extraordinary body of work. Though the artistic achievements of Lucy Jarvis have largely been obscured by her lack of commercial ambition and her reputation as an opinionated and eccentric character, a resurgence of interest has finally illuminated her place in Canadian art history.

A graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Lucy Jarvis co-founded, with Pegi Nicol MacLeod, the Art Centre of the University of New Brunswick in 1941. Together they envisioned a centre for all the arts, a vision that evolved in breadth and depth under Jarvis's guidance in the years after Nicol MacLeod's death, with far-reaching results.

Yet, despite her major contributions to the arts, it wasn't until twenty years later that Jarvis freed her own distinctive and powerfully expressive voice as an artist. In the early 1960s, Jarvis confessed the "she was just on the threshold of beginning." She left the Art Centre and headed for Paris. In four extended stays, she immersed herself in French cultural life, attending open studios and connecting with other artists.

During summer months, Jarvis retreated to Pembroke Dyke near Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, where she digested her experiences. Her art took on new life. Her once-modest social realism became influenced by impressionism and post-impressionism, emerging finally as something close to expressionism. Her subjects were her neighbours and their children, the fishermen of the community, and in later years, the landscapes and seascapes of southwest Nova Scotia.

Her paintings became more boldly colourful, freer more completely her own. Her oils showed power, sensitivity, and panache. Her sketchbooks went even further, expressing her distinctive personality as an artist.

Imbued with energy, ehr images display an astonishing understanding of colour and a rare luminosity. At once vigorous, lucid, and extraordinarily diverse, Jarvis's paintings are a rare feast for the eye, a life-giving vision to what once may have been lost. - 20160302"