Artist William Perehudoff on Dec. 11, 1980.Edward Regan/The Globe and Mail
One afternoon in the early spring of 1944, Bill Perehudoff, a somewhat taciturn 26-year-old Doukhobor farmer who liked to paint landscapes in his spare time, drove into Saskatoon to "see if artists looked different from other people."
Stimulated by those he met at the local arts centre and reassured by their encouragement, he submitted a streetscape to an exhibition at the centre the following year. It took top honours at the spring show and, for the next six decades, Mr. Perehudoff, who died on Feb. 26, went on to earn an international reputation for his abstract works of stripped down fields of colour.
"He invited you to live with colour, he was one of the greatest colourists this province and Canada has produced," said Timothy Long, head curator at Saskatchewan's Norman MacKenzie Art Gallery. "His paintings can be a bit strident. The colours can put you on edge, but they move you into their space, into a wonderful environment that you can live with.
"He responded to cubism," Mr. Long continued. "He was introduced to an offshoot of cubism and like a number of artists of his era, he took that, built on it and was known for it."
Although most biographies give his birthdate as 1919, William Wassily Perehudoff, the eldest of four children, was born on April 21, 1918, and raised in the Doukhobor colony of Bogdanovka, west of Saskatoon.
Doukobors are a pacifist religious group known as "spirit wrestlers," and were notorious for failing to fill out official government documents. The family Bible records the correct date of his birth.
His grandfather was among the first group of dissidents to be sponsored by Leo Tolstoy, who helped pay for them to leave Russia in 1899 and emigrate to Saskatchewan. Mr. Perehudoff's first language was Russian, and he dropped out of school when he was 15 to work on the family farm.
His longtime friend, sculptor Douglas Bentham, who delivered a eulogy at the traditional Doukhobor funeral, recalled that Mr. Perehudoff grew up surrounded by colour. "Walls in a Doukhobor homestead are all brightly decorated with wallpaper and cushions. You couldn't escape the colour. It had to have had an influence. He was a man of a few words. He wasn't a great conversationalist."
Saskatoon artist and art dealer Robert Christie remembered Mr. Perehudoff as a man with "an impish sense of humour, although I never heard him tell a joke. He was a man of great ambition, and over and above his art, there was the man, a terrific guy, humble, intelligent and generous. He had a reserved nature, but if you pushed the right buttons you could get him going. He was no fool."
Mr. Perehudoff completed his formal education by correspondence school. In order to finance his art studies, he took a part-time job working for Fred Mendel, a leading art collector who owned a meat packing plant in Saskatoon.
Intrigued by Mexican mural painting. Mr. Perehudoff studied in Colorado with the muralist Jean Charlot after painting a mural for Mr. Mendel in the packing plant's cafeteria.
He met Dorothy Knowles, a farmer's daughter, and an aspriring artist in her own right, who was working as a lab technician in Saskatoon. Saskatoon at the time had little contact with the wide world of art, but it did have a small group of European immigrant artists such as Robert Hurley and Augustus Kenderdine. "They were very active, and artists would regularly get together and discuss art," Ms. Knowles recalled. "It was Ernest Linder (an Austrian-born artist) who was the catalyst for the early gatherings."
Mr. Perehudoff went to New York in 1950 and Ms. Knowles left for London the following year. They wrote to each other and in 1951 he joined her in London, and bought her the first good meal she had enjoyed in England.
That Christmas, they married in Paris. They spent their honeymoon touring galleries in France and Italy, where Mr. Perehudoff was influenced by the clean, thin buildup of glazes of Giotto and the Renaissance painters.
The couple returned to Saskatoon in 1952. In order to support his family, Mr. Perehudoff took a job as art director for Modern Press. There, some of his earliest work included illustrations of historic Prairie figures for a series that ran in the Western Producer. His mural in the Saskatoon bus terminal, painted in 1955, was the first to grace a public building in Saskatchewan. It was destroyed when the bus depot was demolished in the 1970s.
During the 1950s, the Perehudoffs participated at the Emma Lake workshops being given in Saskatchewan by major New York artists, including critic Clement Greenberg.
Mr. Perehudoff 's career got a boost when Mr. Greenberg declared that his work ranked with that of Jack Bush, who was then the leading Canadian expressionist.
In the early 1970s, Mr. Perehudoff had his first major exhibition at the Waddington Galleries in Toronto and Montreal, and in New York at the Noah Goldowsky Gallery. In 1978, Globe and Mail art critic James Purdie hailed him as one of the most important colour painters of his time. "His vertical and horizontal bands of invented colour resonate. They advance and recede on the surface of the canvas like notes on a restricted scale. Three shades are played against two, or five against seven."
The Montreal Gazette agreed that Mr. Perehudoff's "blocks and slabs of colour lean and push against each other, setting up a series of moving pressures upon a white ground, which gives each canvas the kind of sequence one experienced with sound."
By the late 1970s he began to enjoy the commercial success as an artist, which allowed him to retire from Modern Press in 1977, after 25 years.
Mr. Perehudoff was a man with a curious mind and he appreciated hard work and steady application.
"He pushed us. He would have a fit if he wasn't working. He had a work ethic," said Ms. Knowles, his widow. "He was very encouraging. I was nine years younger than he was. I learned so much from him. We had a very harmonious relationship. "
Mr. Perehudoff continued to farm, and painted up until a few years ago, when his health began to fail. A major retrospective of his work mounted by the Mendel Art Gallery toured Canada three years ago.
The artist was named to the Order of Canada in 1999 and last year was awarded the Queen's Jubilee Medal.
He leaves his wife Dorothy and their daughters, Rebecca, Catherine and Carol.