A Prairie Boy's Winter

by William Kurelek

Text and twenty color paintings depict the rigors and simple pleasures during the stark 1930s.

Genres: Picture Books, Childrens, History, Canada, Biography Memoir, Nonfiction, Christmas

48 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

William Kurelek (Wasyl), painter and writer, evangelist. Influenced by Bosch and Brueghel and by prairie roots, his Ukrainian heritage and Roman Catholicism, Kurelek's realistic and symbolic paintings record his historic culture and religious vision. The oldest of 7 children, he was expected to help run the farm. His lack of mechanical aptitude attracted harsh criticism from his father, as did his wish to be an artist. He studied at Winnipeg, Toronto and San Miguel, Mexico. In England (1952-59), he sought psychiatric help and was hospitalized for severe emotional problems, depression and eye pain. He converted to Roman Catholicism (1957), credited God with his healing, and began to paint the Passion of Christ according to St Matthew. This series of 160 paintings is housed in the Niagara Falls Art Gallery and Museum.
Returning to Toronto, he was established by the early 1960s as an important painter, alternating realistic works depicting his prairie roots with didactic series. In the 1970s he began to publish his paintings with simple texts. His books for children (A Prairie Boy's Winter, 1973; Lumberjack, 1974; A Prairie Boy's Summer, 1975; and A Northern Nativity, 1976) have become modern classics. His autobiography, Someone With Me (1973, rev ed 1980), ends with his marriage to Jean Andrews (1962). Kurelek was an outstanding artist with a unique idealistic and pragmatic vision. A modern Jeremiah, he painted a coming apocalypse - divine justice on a materialistic, secular society.

Reviews

[Manybooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Famous Canadian visual artist (and writer) William Kurelek's (1923-1977) A Prairie Boy's Winter is both aesthetically and textually a glowing and engaging homage to and description of winter life on the Canadian prairies (in the early part of the 20th century, but indeed, even today, especially in the traditional farming areas of Southern Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, much of what William Kurelek describes as how winter arrived, for months strongly remained and flourished until slowly playing itself out in late March to the middle of April during his boyhood on the Canadian prairies is still relevant and often very much the truth).

Showing not only winter fun and games (ice skating, outdoor tag, skiing behind a hayrack, building snow forts and the like) but also pointing out the season's many potential hardships (the multitude of daily necessary farmyard chores and tasks, not to mention such dangers and threats as raging blizzards and dangerously freezing subzero temperatures that could freeze bare skin within minutes if not seconds) the combination of Kurelek's full page winter themed paintings (gloriously descriptive, especially capturing the abundance of snow, the vastness of the prairie landscapes) and his detailed narrational descriptions of each of the featured pieces of art (every one of them presenting a specific winter scene and scenario from Kurelek's own childhood remembrances, from his life as a so-called prairie boy and farmer's son), A Prairie Boy's Winter is most definitely both a feast for the eyes and an engagingly told and recounted historically accurate memoir of early 2oth century winter seasons on the Canadian prairies.

High recommended, but with the added caveat that the narrative of A Prairie Boy's Winter is most certainly rather wordy and dense and thus more suitable to and for older children and even adults, although in my opinion even younger children not yet reading independently would likely find the accompanying artwork so detailed, engaging and evocative that they might not even all that much if at all require the accompanying text (that they might in fact and indeed get oh so very much out of A Prairie Boy's Winter just from the visuals, just from simply poring over William Kurelek's totally and utterly amazing paintings).

[Joseph Jeffery · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this aloud to my Grandma who grew up on the prairies in the 30s. She felt it was very accurate and reflected a history of her childhood. So, in that respect it certainly succeeded in capturing that spirit.

[Lobstergirl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kurelek narrates a typical prairie winter in hardscrabble 1930s Manitoba, where his family owned a dairy farm. Twenty of Kurelek's wonderful paintings illustrate the text, from the crows flying south in late fall (which reminds me of Van Gogh), to the first crow in a March sky heralding the coming of spring. Winter is brutal for everyone, adults, children, and animals. Indoors, only the kitchen is kept constantly heated with firewood. The barn has no water, so the cows have to be led outside to drink at the trough. They "would hunch up their backs and charge toward the water trough to get the whole experience over with as quickly as possible" and "now and then as the cows drank they had to lift their teeth out of it when the chill became too painful." There's also ice hockey (the rinks are hand poured over several days), skating in frozen bog ditches, skiing behind the horse-pulled hayrack, snowball fights, and tunnelling in snow drifts.

[gloriabluestocking · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many short sketches of the author's childhood memories of winter on the prairie, paired with delightful illustrations. It captures a way of life gone now, and though I've never been to the prairies myself, this book gave me a sweet look into something the author loves and knows intimately.

[katsok · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful book and pairs perfectly with Twelve Kinds of Ice.

[Jana · Rating 3 out of 5]

When kids (and grownups) start to complain about the long, cold winter, this is a good book to share to remind ourselves of how brutal winter on the prairies of Canada during the 1930s could be. With engaging text and beautifully painted illustrations, this book describes the hard work and fun games of winter so long ago. This would be great to include with a study unit on prairie life.

[Fjóla · Rating 3 out of 5]

Twenty beautiful paintings describe the life of a little boy out on the prairies of Manitoba in the 1930s.

[Matthew RC · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just a delight. A gem of classic Canadiana. The art is beautiful and the stories unfold so easily. I read this hundreds of times as a child and my boys love it too.

[Sandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I actually really liked this children's book. I wish he had written a book for teens or adults because things that he did growing up I can only imagine.