Goddess Of Abundance

Elizabeth Holbrook's panels: sleek, simplified and modern

Sculptress was a word that sculptor Elizabeth Bradford Holbrook did not like. But the way life is, it was perhaps inevitable that a Spectator headline writer called her just that when her stone panels for the new Federal Building were unveiled in October 1955.

The reliefs on the building at Main West and Caroline are not the only highlights in Holbrook's long and distinguished career, which began in the 1930s. The award-winning Hamilton artist, who died in 2009 at the age of 95, said late in life, “Hamilton's a tough place for an artist.” But she managed to create more than 100 works, including plaques, medals and bronze portrait heads of MP Ellen Fairclough and Rabbi Bernard Baskin, among others.

She also raised three children. Yet she once described herself as “inherently lazy.”

Holbrook first studied painting, embracing sculpture only when she became a student at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto. She then enrolled at the prestigious Royal College of Art in London.

She had always admired Henry Moore, a decidedly modern British sculptor, and when she visited England in the 1970s, she was able to spend an afternoon with him. “It was exciting,” she said.

When it came to creating the eight relief sculptures flanking the entrance to the Federal Building , Holbrook's style had already evolved into something sleek, simplified and modern.

The architects envisioned two 12-foot vertical panels flanking the doorway. But Holbrook decided such big reliefs would look too cluttered and confusing. She suggested smaller panels, each highlighting a specific subject.

The eight panels, each measuring about 36 by 24 inches, represent four important resource-based industries — mining, lumbering, farming and fishing — and four distinctively Canadian animals — Canada geese, beavers, caribou and black bears.

The panels are superbly composed, with a minimum of detail and setting, allowing the subject to dominate each panel and be clearly visible from the ground.

Holbrook designed the panels and made the clay models, a process that took about a year. They were then faithfully copied in stone with a pneumatic chisel by Joseph Gause, who lived in Burlington.

In working together, Holbrook and Gause were continuing a traditional relationship in which one artist designs a piece in plaster and someone else executes it in a more permanent material such as stone or bronze.

Tetka Rhu - #SOUL Deep ART of Living: #GoS abundance GODDESS

Tetka Rhu, Zen Art Gallery Owner and Resident Artist opens up a plethora of experiences through the fusion of thoughts and feelings. TetkaART has been described as being of the new millennia where the age of the Spiritual Revolution now reigns. When we unite our energies for the betterment of ALL, we are further motivated to stay on the path less travelled. Engage with TetkaART and know the profound wisdom of the ancients which lays in the belly of ALL. Tetka Rhu has been defined as a leader in Spiritual Art as she embraces energies through from other worlds and defines them in clear, concise patterns that some people have referred to as Sacred Geometric forms. Art became a Way of Life for Tetka as she realised the healing energy she accessed to improve peoples' quality of life. Inspired to action she sought consultation through meditation with the Goddess or forming principles of creation as the energy alignment to reveal the vibration required for harmony to be the known reality in peoples' environment.

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