A Painter’s Paradise Logo
Curated by Mary-Beth Laviolette
A Painter’s Paradise focuses on the life and art of local artists Michael Pisko and Ernest Riethman. Early members of the Lethbridge Sketch Club, their enthusiasm for their home left a legacy of wonderful paintings. Pisko and Riethman’s subject was generally landscape but depicted in two very different styles in which vivid impressions were created about Lethbridge, southwestern Alberta and the Rockies. Active from the 1930s on, the exhibition explores the relationship each artist had with the Lethbridge community as well their connections to major Canadian painters in cultivating a strong landscape tradition for the region.
Articles
Praised by Canadian artist Bart Pragnell for his “high calibre” artistry with a “thoroughness and technical excellence sometimes missing in contemporary work,” Riethman was able to incorporate these aspects of his training and experiment with modernist developments in art such as impressionism, cubism and abstraction.