Stanley Ernest Brunst

Stanley Brunst was born in 1894 in Birmingham, England. Brunst immigrated with his family to Canada in 1912 and moved to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in 1923. In the early 1930s, Brunst took an evening class with Augustus Kenderdine at the University of Saskatchewan, but as an artist, Brunst was mainly self-taught. Local artists, including Ernest Lindner, Wynona Mulcaster, and Robert Hurley, were a great influence on Brunst. In 1936, he experienced a turning point in his career when he committed himself to abstract art. Terrence Heath would later write, "In the late 80s, Stan Brunst was probably the most innovative and modern painter on the prairies. At a time when the European 'isms' of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were just beginning to assert their influence on prairie art and the control by academy art was on the wane, Brunst had already absorbed, understood and begun to experiment with perspective changes, patterning, free use of color and nonrepresentational images." Brunst worked in a dry cleaning plant while developing as an artist. He never had much money, and some of his paintings are painted on cardboard, linoleum, and old calendars. When he moved to Vancouver in 1941, he again found work in dry cleaning while continuing to paint and involve himself in the local art community. Brunst's work has been exhibited throughout western Canada and is found in the collections of the Mendel Art Gallery (Saskatoon), Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Saskatchewan Arts Board. In 1982, the Mendel Art Gallery organized a retrospective of his work. Stanley Brunst died in Vancouver in 1962.