the artist

A Canadian Painter: Ahead of His Time

Untitled 1982

George Fertig 1950’s –Kitsilano

“From the mid-50’s on, George and others like him, choose to step outside the mainstream and go their own way. They were completely individual. And as other people have observed, if these painters and sculptors were working in a big center like New York, they would become the latest. But the problem with the art world is that if you are living in the boondocks, Vancouver or Milwaukee or any other place in North America, in order to be acknowledged you have to be someone who imitates the well-known stuff that you see in the art magazines. Art that's being produced in the big cities. And some of the guys who ended up going to New York and being quote, “original painters”, choose the direction of art in the United States and admit that if they’d stayed in the smaller communities they would either be forced to be imitators of what had previously existed in the big centers, or they would have probably have been ignored. And I think this is what has happened to your father and all the people like him, almost none of who, incidentally, have any official acknowledgment in this province.”

– excerpt from interview with David Marshall, June 26, 1996

“...Only the historian–and he, too, is limited by his personal equation and his ties to his epoch–can evaluate the authentic historical significance of a group, a movement, or an individual. For there is no necessary relation between the true importance of a man and that imputed to him by his own time–that is, by the representatives of his own cultural canon. In the course of time, “leaders” and “geniuses” are exposed as frauds, while outsiders, outlaws, nobodies, are found to have been true vehicles of reality.”

– Erich Neumann –
Essay on Art & Time, 1957

“ George Fertig was self-taught. As an artist he felt that the biographical details of his long involvement with painting were unimportant, Fertig preferred to speak of his meditation on mythology, alchemy and Jungian psychology.”

– excerpt from Surrey Art Gallery Jan. Newsletter 1979

    "There are unique technical qualities in George Fertig's paintings. This is the work of an imaginative artist who has the courage to pursue his own inner promptings.
    There is texture and feeling in the large, simple shapes with a sense of space and atmosphere behind them. All the paintings are labeled "Untitled," leaving the spectator to draw his own conclusions.
    A large landscape with a peculiar haunting beauty dominates the group, and the compelling and inspired painting of a swan will evoke much interest."

– "Work of 4 Artists on Display" by Mildred Valley Thornton, Sunday Sun, Vancouver,
June 20 1953

“Art has become big business in many quarters, with picture dealing and personal gain playing a role which is as important as that of sensitivity and aesthetics. Costly promotional and advertising techniques unknown before the war can and do catapult certain types of painting and certain painters into an overrated position at the expense of more meaningful and sensitive workers.”

– J. Russell Harper,
Painting in Canada 1966.

George & Evelyn Fertig

Granville Street, Vancouver

early 1970’s

© 2007 Mona Fertig.

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Last updated: April 12/07

“the loss and destruction of local art and art history from the past
hundred years is staggering” - Gary Sim - author of Art & Artists
in exhibition, Vol 1: Vancouver B.C. 1890-1950

George Thane Fertig – 1915-1983

Who was George Fertig?
Few people remember the West Coast painter who stood apart from the mainstream and worked in Vancouver from 1941 until his death in 1983. George Fertig was an artists’ artist. He was profoundly influenced by: Gauguin, Van Gogh, Chardin, painters of the Sung Dynasty, and the writings of Carl Jung. His oil paintings range from early large and powerful archetypal images to small numinous and visionary meditations on eternity. His work is highly esteemed by those who delight in the revelation of inner realities through art. Serious, self-taught, deeply intelligent and forthright, he never compromised his integrity nor swayed from his creative path.

Unfortunately, if you wish to view his work or learn more about his life & philosophy, your chances are almost nonexistent. You will not find his paintings in the permanent collection at the Vancouver Art Gallery, as acquisition of local art from the 1950’s has been critically neglected. You will not find his work in any other public gallery in Canada. All of George Fertig’s work resides in private collections in Canada, the USA & Japan. His name and work as an artist, like so many others, has disappeared from public view.

In B.C. during the 1950’s and early 60’s, the abstract expressionist movement polarized the North American art community and from it emerged the Vancouver mainstream led by Jack Shadbolt, B. C. Binning, Gordon Smith, Roy Kiyooka, Takao Tanabe, Toni Onley etc. At the same time there were other serious artists on the west coast whose art developed separately from the art that was in vogue, the art that dominated the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Vancouver Art School. These artists followed their own creative visions and their work equaled and often surpassed the temporal heat of collective spawning, New York imitation or institutional patronage. Few found galleries to represent them, as galleries were not plentiful then, and most of these artists remain unknown today. These were not artists who straddled mediocrity or explored the innovative in order to record their own self-development or startle society, these were artists who focused continuously on the perfection of their vision.

“It is precisely when the artist does not represent the existing canon but transforms and overturns it that his function rises to the level of the sacral, for he gives utterance to the authentic and direct revelation of the numinosum.”
– Erich Neumann – Art & the Creative Unconscious

One of these artists was my father, George Fertig. Over the years, the more I have reflected and understood the depth and uniqueness of his paintings, and his symbiotic life relationship with my mother, Evelyn, and the more I heard the mantra of the established Vancouver artists, who were his contemporaries, swell to a lauded crescendo, the more I wondered why his paintings need disappear forever from view.

I have visited galleries in London, New York, San Francisco, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver and I have yet to see work like his. So through research and writing I hope to place his art back in the world so others may experience it, via a book tentatively titled: Ahead of His Time: The Mystic & Archetypal Paintings of George Fertig, West Coast Artist.

Not only will this book open, for the first time, a door on Vancouver’s untold art history, but it will also reveal the life of an artist who traveled against the grain of an era, and the struggle out of which his art was born. It will also honour the work of those artists who walk such a path, despite commercial failure or institutional or societal neglect. For there are many untold stories of B.C. artists who, in being forgotten or rejected, have succumbed to depression, starvation, suicide, or destroyed their art. It is for these artists, erased from history, that George Fertig’s story must be told.

My experience as an artist’s daughter, growing up in Kitsilano and Burnaby with my sister was unique. It is an experience few curators, critics or gallery owners can write from. And it is a point of view that no art books in B.C. have broached. My mother Evelyn Fertig, (1925-1994) supported the family by working at The Vancouver Sun while my father painted daily at home. We did not live in an architecturally designed house or have a car. Art sustained our lives. My father’s rebellious, yet sensitive and introverted nature set him apart from the inner art circle. And he paid the price with obscurity and deep disappointment. Such is fate, or such is the life of an artist, ahead of his time.

–Mona Fertig
April 12, 2007

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