Riopelle

Les tableaux de Jean-Paul Riopelle sont connus à travers le monde. Mais le peintre lui-même demeure secret et insaisissable. Le film, voulant cerner l'homme derrière l'artiste et le génie créateur derrière l'oeuvre, le suit au gré de ses activités journalières. Nous le voyons d'abord au travail, à l'atelier de la fondation Maeght; avec ses amis à son atelier de Saint-Cyr-en-Arthies; puis à la rétrospective Riopelle au Musée du Québec; enfin, chassant et pêchant au coeur de la forêt québécoise, qui demeure pour lui une source d'inspiration continuelle et profonde.

A film about the life and work of one of Canada's foremost modern painters. Borduas swung from religious painting to the purest of black-and-white abstraction. This film provides the opportunity to follow the development of his styles--surrealism, cubism, and automatism.

From his colourful canvases, William Kurelek paints a vivid history of his father, who left the Ukraine after World War I to begin a life of farming in Canada. There are scenes of village life in the Ukraine, then the early days of struggle on an Alberta homestead, and the growing comfort, confidence and family. The narrator tells the story as Kurelek remembers it and his paintings record it - harvest time, weddings, the move to Manitoba and scenes from prairie life in the '20s and '30s. The story concludes with the move down east where his father had planned to retire, but finding idleness irksome, he bought a small farm. Here in Ontario, Kurelek paints another landscape with the same pleasure he painted the old.