BC Pageant, a 19 metre long mural painted by Scottish-born Canadian artist Charles F. Comfort, RCA. Charles painted the mural in 1951, assisted by muralist Orville Fisher and two of their art students: Barbara Kathryn Cook (later Barbara Kathryn Cook-Endres) and Gordon Dixon (a Vancouver School of Art student of Fisher at the time).

The mural was commissioned by TD Bank and it was painted onsite at 499 Granville Street in Vancouver. About the mural’s former home, architects McCarter and Nairne built the Granville and Pender branch in 1948-49, a building that exemplified the International style. Later in 1958, McCarter and Nairne was once again hired to build another flagship bank across the street, this time for the Imperial Bank of Commerce (also seen here previously).

Cross-posted with additional text at VancouverIsAwesome.com. I normally don’t like to ramble, but this is one of those exceptions where I just could not stop talking. I hope you appreciate my indulgence; I promise to return to brevity - the Internet demands short and tweet.

Untitled, Orville Fisher’s mural from 1957 featuring the figure of Mercury, god of messages and glad tidings, inside the post office building at 349 West Georgia Street, by the Homer Street entrance. Technically, this might not actually be depicting Vancouver, but due to the fact that the artist was a Vancouverite and this mural is one of the city’s great under-appreciated murals, I am including it without any hesitation.

The mural is captioned: “Transporting the Royal Mails by land, sea, and air in British Columbia” and is viewable from the street through a double set of glass doors. Also mentioned in John Steil’s book Public Art in Vancouver: Angels Among Lions: “The mural shows the evolution of mail delivery, from stagecoaches to ships, from biplanes to helicopters (there is a landing pad on the roof!).” Orville Fisher studied at the Vancouver School of Art, painted murals with E J Hughes and Paul Goranson for the Golden Gate International Exposition, as well as a lost series of murals at First United Church in Chinatown. He went on to become a respected WWII documentary artist, and later he taught at the Vancouver School of Art.

Vancouver, City of Destiny, an illustration by Paul Goranson and Orville Fisher, depicting a wise old Father Time directing a young man towards his destiny. Props to inter-generational mentoring!

From the cover of the Vancouver Daily Province, Golden Jubilee supplement, Thursday, May 31, 1936. According to the Province, May 23, 1936 edition, the two men were grand prize winners of a $100 contest to design the special edition layout. The contest attracted 75 entries.

Image shown here courtesy of The Province. Newspaper from the VPL Special Collections, VPL 971.133 V22pg. Cross-posted to VancouverIsAwesome.com.

Industry, a two-part mural painted for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. Painted by Paul Goranson, E.J. Hughes, and Orville Fisher, the three “were known as The Three Musketeers of Art’ in reference to the fact that they were artists who had enlisted.” (source) The trio also called themselves the West Coast Brotherhood, echoing the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. (source)

A total of 15 make that 12 murals in this series were painted, part of a project called “Art in Action”, which featured the murals painted on the walls of the exhibition hall. WWII caused the Expo to close early, but smaller versions of the murals survive in the BC Archives in Victoria. (source) These two murals are also seen in the book Free Spirit: Stories of You, Me and BC by Gerald Truscott.

E.J. Hughes, described by Jack Shadbolt as “the most engaging intuitive painter of the BC landscape since Emily Carr”, he is truly an icon of modern day Canadian art. (source)

“Orville Fisher’s paintings of the Second World War constitute one of the most complete records of Canada’s day-to-day role in that conflict. Perhaps his chief claim to fame is that he was the only Allied war artist to land in Normandy on D-Day, 6 June 1944. This achievement is all the more extraordinary given the fact that he almost never made it overseas in the first place.” More

Orville Fisher’s mural featuring the figure of Mercury, god of messages and glad tidings, appears inside the post office building at 349 West Georgia Street, by the Homer Street entrance. He also assisted with the 1951 mural “B.C. Pageant” with Charles Comfort and 2 students.

“After the war, Goranson remained for two years with the RCAF in Ottawa, working up his pencil, charcoal and watercolour sketches into canvases. Then, finding no work in Toronto, he went to New York” (source) where “he became a display designer and then a scenic artist, joining the Metropolitan Opera in 1965. Here he worked under artists and designers such as Franco Zefferelli, Sir Cecil Beaton, and Marc Chagall. But he remained a Canadian citizen and, upon retirement in 1986 at the age of 75, returned to Vancouver.” (source)

Goranson is, without a doubt, one of my all time favourites.

Low resolution images PDP02285 and PDP02286 shown here are courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives. Cross-posted to Vancouver Is Awesome.