Perehudoff painting, at Batoche Museum.

Image of painting by Perehudoff which hangs in the museum at Batoche. The painting depicts the Northcote hitting the lowered ferry cables, May 9, 1885.

Historical note:

William Perehudoff, painter (b at Langham, Sask 1919). Though he has lived most of his adult life in Saskatoon, he left the Prairies as a young man to study art. He explored mural painting at the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center (1948-49), then studied with French Cubist Amédée Ozenfant in New York. Ozenfant's purism and insistence on "significant form" impressed Perehudoff deeply. The notion of stripping a painting down to its essentials is the core of his developed work 30 years later. Perehudoff's knowledge and ambition were expanded by his travels in the US and Europe in 1952. He married Dorothy KNOWLES in 1952 and they returned to western Canada, where he earned his living as a commercial artist.The University of Saskatchewan's summer artists' workshops at Emma Lake (see EMMA LAKE ARTISTS' WORKSHOP) influenced him during the period 1957-68, notably those led by American critic Clement GREENBERG (1962) and painter Kenneth Noland (1963). Their respect for his work encouraged his development of large-scale, abstract painting. In 1987 he was invited to participate in the Triangle Workshop in New York state. In 1988 he was, himself, a workshop leader at Emma Lake. Perehudoff's continuing preoccupations are with colour, surface and texture. His work has evolved through complex orchestrations of colour from a Cubist-derived geometry in the 1960s and 1970s, through painterly applications in the 1980s to complex compositions in the 1990s, the latter stimulated by his DOUKHOBOR heritage. He has exhibited widely in Canada, the US and Europe, and is regarded by many as the heir to Jack BUSH as Canada's most important colour field painter. In 1999 he was made a Member of the ORDER OF CANADA.Author TERRY FENTON; source The Canadian Encyclopedia.