York Wilson: His Life and Work, 1907-1984

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

This book is a painstakingly detailed chronicle of the life and artistic
accomplishments of one of Canada’s best-known visual artists and arts
activists, Torontonian York Wilson, whose murals have graced the walls
of such public and corporate buildings as Bell Canada, Carleton
University, The O’Keefe Centre, Imperial Oil, Dow Corning, Central
Hospital, Simpson-Sears, and the Salvation Army. Written by Wilson’s
wife of 50 years, Lela Wilson, the book is crammed with personal
anecdotes and meticulous details of their life together. The foreword by
Michael Bell, director of the Carleton University Art Gallery,
acknowledges Lela’s tireless dedication as “the steward of
[York’s] legacy.”

Published 66 years after Wilson’s first exhibition and 13 years after
his death, the biography comprises 26 chapters that are replete with the
names of friends, artists, and literati; 14 pages of black-and-white
“photographic memories,” as well as many photographs in the body of
the text; indexes of people and of Wilson’s works; and an afterword by
Marshall McLuhan, which is a reprint of his 1978 foreword to an earlier
work. While the book makes no attempt to be an academic critique, it
does provide a critical context that is important to an understanding of
York Wilson’s unique creative accomplishments.

As Marshall McLuhan wrote, “The painting of York Wilson is not based
so much on new skills and techniques as on a new way of seeing and
knowing the world.” Thanks to Lela Wilson’s tenacity, we now have a
permanent record of what York Wilson saw and thought during his
lifetime.