Apples, Etc.: An Artist's Memoir

By Gathie Falk

Gathie Falk (1928-2025) was one of Canada's most heralded visual artists: she won the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts, the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts, and the Gershon Iskowitz Prize; she was honoured with the Order of British Columbia and the Order of Canada; and her work was featured in major galleries across the country. From performance works involving eggs and bird feathers, to paintings of flower beds and night skies, to celebrated sculptures of fruit, men's shoes, and dresses, Falk's chronicles of the everyday spanned more than six decades and a variety of media.

Apples etc. is Gathie Falk's memoir, a lively, personal, and yet unsentimental reflection on nearly ninety years of art and life. Falk tells of growing up in small Mennonite communities in the 1930s and '40s. These were hard years, as her Russian immigrant father died just ten months after she was born. While the family struggled financially, Falk recalls cabbage rolls made by hand, a backyard skating rink, and music lessons paid for by an anonymous donor. Her apprenticeship, she says, was a long one. After working a series of menial jobs, she trained as a public school teacher, which led her back to the art classes she'd given up as a child.

At the time of writing this book, it had been fifty years since Falk's art career was launched, and her "veneration of the ordinary" had sustained her through the deaths of beloved friends and relatives, a short-lived marriage, broken bones, and debilitating pain. Interweaving stories about her community, her family, and her daily rituals with anecdotes about her major artworks, Falk paints a portrait of a life well lived.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1773270125
• ISBN13: 9781773270128
• Release Date: May 2018
• Publisher: Figure 1 Publishing
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.7" x 7.7"