An Unknown Artist gets Known by Dave Jaffe: Part One

An Unknown Artist Gets Known by Dave Jaffe


    "Success has a thousand parents," U.S. president John Fitzgerald Kennedy said way back in the 1960's. "But failure is an orphan."
   By mainstream standards , the late George  Fertig, who was a Vancouver based artist, probably did fail. He's surely not mentioned in any Canadian art history book. Few artists ever said they'd influenced him. And his paintings never made it into most public art galleries. Also for long stretches of his life, he endured grinding poverty.
      Yet out in the real world there's thousands of artists like George Fertig. Without them, the Canadian art scene would be much poorer.
      Now Fertig's life has been written about by one of his two daughters, Mona Fertig. Her book is called 'The Life and Art of George Fertig'. Mona Fertig has set up 'Mother Tongue Publishing Ltd' and has unearthed many other forgotten B.C. visual artists. Mona Fertig is a poet,  a publisher as already mentioned, an author many times over and now a biographer of her dad. This is a story worth telling.
    George Thane Fertig was born into small town Alberta in 1915. He lived in a sod house for a while as his mother and father braved life on the prairies. George's father George Samuel Fertig gambled and was a drinker. He gambled away his property and the family fell onto desperate times. George's mother Grace Faulkner held the family together as they moved from one place to another.
     Any time is a bad time to be poor but the Fertigs had chosen the worst time of all. They grew up in the Great Depression of the 1930's. "The Great Depression," writes Mona Fertig, "combined with years of drought in the West, brought massive unemployment, poverty, bankruptcy, soup kitchens and destitution."
     The elder George Fertig died in the 1930's. The young George went through a nervous breakdown. Yet then he took up photography, and then in his twenties began to paint in oils. in the late 1940's, Fertig ended up in Vancouver where he stayed for the rest of his life. Here he launched himself on his artistic career and faced many obstacles in the process.
        (To Be continued: End of Part One).