Sonia Cornwall

Cariboo Ranch Scenes

July 8 to August 27, 2000

An essay by Guest Curator Eileen Truscott

The Kelowna Art Gallery is pleased to present a historical art exhibition of unique interest. Sonia Cornwall, an artist well known in the Williams Lake area, will exhibit her work in the gallery from July 8~ to August 27~. An exhibition of her work at this time is appropriate, considering the increasing interest in both Canadian history as well as regional Canadian art history, especially in regard to history molded by women. Much of Cornwall's early life intersected with the very romantic era of the opening of the West and the transition from European cultural traditions to the beginnings of a particularly Canadian art history.

Sonia was born in 1919 in Kamloops where her father, C.G. or "Deadwood" Cowan was a property agent. Legends that nourished her belief structure and values were generated from her father's adventures. Her father had arrived in Kamloops after leaving Ireland when he was fifteen to visit his brother's farm in South Carolina. In the late nineteenth century he went to Mexico but arrived during a pre-Revolutionary Mexican gunfight. Family legend recounts how he was looking at a magazine while sheltering under a bed from stray bullets and saw an advertisement for the North West Mounted Police, in Edmonton. He rode up to Edmonton to join their division, and was with them for six years. During that time he learned how to speak the Cree language, how to guide, and how to track and hunt. While following a murderer into British Columbia, he first saw what later became his Onward Ranch, and vowed to come back. Later, when he became a property agent in Kamloops he started to put together the land that formed the Onward Ranch which included the 150 Mile Ranch and the Jones Lake Ranch. At one time this ranch included over 11,000 acres and substantial grazing rights on Crown Land. Sonia still calls this a small ranch when compared to the other great ranches in the area.

"Deadwood" also guided English visitors on six-month trips to Canada while persuading them to invest in land. He wrote about these expeditions for the British magazine Country Life and traveled back and forth, crossing the Atlantic sixty-nine times, from Canada to Europe on his pass for the Canadian Pacific Railway. He had received a pass for rail and steamship travel because he wrote for their agricultural column. Before his marriage he spent the winters in London enjoying theatre and his club. Every winter he visited for a few days at Tatton Place as a guest of Lord Egerton who had frequently employed him as a guide and agent. He would also visit Lord Exeter at Burleigh House. He had met Lord Exeter when he had served as the agent for Lord Exeter's ranch at 100 Mile House. "Deadwood" also served as a guide for the collection for the Rothschild Museum in New York, and the Kensington Museum in London where you can see the record moose, with antlers over 7 feet, that he shot in Kodiak, Alaska.

We can imagine that at the turn of the century "Deadwood" Cowan would be quite a catch. He was good looking and had an office, a house, a buggy with a handsome pair of bay horses with brass-trimmed harness, a chauffeur and a housekeeper. Every year a crate of books would arrive from the Times Book Club in London, England. When Sonia's mother Vivien Tully arrived from Portland, Oregon it was love at first sight.

Sonia was born in 1919 and it is interesting to note how a young lady raised on a ranch in the interior of British Columbia would be educated. She grew up at a time when there were smudge pots in the garden, mosquito nets at home over the bed, and children were to be seen and not heard. But she had her dog, Mr. Timothy, and her horse, Camp. When she was nine she stayed with family friends in Kamloops and attended Miss Beattie's School. On Saturday morning she had art classes. When she was old enough she went into Grade Nine at Strathcona Girls' School at Shawnigan Lake on Vancouver Island. When she left this school she began to study in Victoria to be a set designer with Don May, from the Cornish Theatre in Seattle.

During this time, Sonia loved going home to the ranch during the summer months and would see her family during the Winter in Victoria. Any isolation the family felt on the ranch would be counter balanced by the winters spent in Victoria. The family went there each winter accompanied by trunks of linen, silver and books.

But all of this ended in 1939 when her father died. At that time her family, like many others, had no money. Sonia began to take a serious interest in the working of the ranch, laboring beside the men, which was quite an unusual undertaking for a woman at that time. She would rise at five A.M, eat breakfast, feed and harness the team and head to the hay fields for a ten-hour day. Sonia loved it. Her family would still have their books because during the 1930's and the 1940's the public library in Victoria would lend up to six books, send them by mail and even pay the postage each way. At night Sonia remembers rigging up a car battery to a radio and listening to jazz from New Orleans.

During this time Sonia's mother began to take art classes at the Banff School of Fine Arts and met, Canada's well-known Group of Seven artist, A.Y. Jackson. In 1943, Sonia was working on the ranch when she received a telegram from her mother telling her A.Y. Jackson would arrive by bus and to "take care of him". A.Y. Jackson came back several years, each time staying for approximately three weeks. In 1946, with Sonia's mother Vivien, he was the honorary president and founding member of the Cariboo Art Society. At the end of each visit he would set up the paintings that he had produced during this time and offer Sonia and her family their choice from among them. He would then pack up his works with wooden match sticks between the panels and tie them with string and set off to return east. A.Y. Jackson continued his association with the family and Sonia would later send six or seven paintings at a time to him for criticism.

In 1946, when Sonia was 27 years old she and her sister went to the Provincial Institute of Technology in Calgary to study art. At this time most of her classmates were ex­servicemen of similar ages. But in spite of this, Sonia and her sister felt they were all treated like children and they only lasted 3 months. Although they had been attracted to this school because Jock MacDonald taught design there, Sonia remembers that they studied still lifes, no nude studies were allowed, and the pubs were segregated. She would take a tram as far out as she could go on the Bow River and paint, or hitch hike out of Calgary to Okotoks and draw people in the pub. A result of her upbringing meant that Sonia was a curious blend of sophistication that found segregated bars strange; she always liked her gin but considered any mix deadly, yet couldn't bear central heating when she was sleeping. Sonia regarded cities as strange, suitable only for visits. She returned to the ranch. In 1948 she married Hugh Cornwall, a native of Ashcroft, who had served as a pilot with the RAF and a flying instructor with the RCAF before coming to the Cariboo to work for the Cariboo Cattlemen's Association.

Like many people living in so-called isolation, she didn't feel lonely or deprived. She continued to work as a rancher while she raised a family and continued to paint. Sonia is largely self-taught and with the help of the C.B.C. radio programmes and extensive reading she continued her artistic interests. She attended out-reach workshops in the Cariboo and received critiques from well known artists. Besides A.Y. Jackson, the artists involved in workshops and critiques included Molly Bobak, Herbert Ziebner, Joe Plaskett, Jack Hardman, Takao Tanabe, Cliff Robinson, and Zelko Kujundzic. Sonia also credits friends who were involved with playwriting, set designing, and writing books and poetry, and who encouraged her to paint. Sonia says she always had interesting friends.

Sonia's real inspiration is the ranch where she and her husband Hugh still live. She is familiar with all its terrain, with the seasonal pattern of calf birthing, branding and round up. When her children were very young and she and her husband were busy running the ranch, Sonia wasn't able to paint. But she was able to store images and experiences to be released later when she could work again in her own lyrical extension of the Canadian Impressionist tradition. The works that we see in her exhibition were produced over a forty-year period and are a testimony to her love of life and the energy and talent that she had to capture this love in her work.

Installation Images

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