Lunchtime, Boys by Elizabeth Kusinski

In Elizabeth's words

The painting “Lunchtime, boys” is of my mother, a young Polish immigrant who arrived in Canada with my father to work for a wealthy magnate Bud McDougald as maid and butler.

My mother was a strong and resilient woman who survived atrocities in a Siberian labour camp (taken with her family at the age of 7 from her family farm in eastern Poland by the Russians and put in cattle cars and sent to the frozen wastelands of Siberia.

​They were released two years later and were part of a long refugee line made up of women and children and the elderly to walk through Iran, Pakistan and India, where they then took a ship to Africa to live in a Polish refugee camp run by the British in Uganda. 

My mother spent her early teen years there till the war was over and then was sent to England where she met and married my father. My mother is the most courageous and strongest woman that I know. This painting represents an easy moment in her life as a young mother in her newly adopted country.

ABOUT ELIZABETH

Elizabeth is a successful professional oil painter and has participated in numerous group shows throughout Ontario including a solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Bancroft and most recently a solo portrait exhibition at the St. Thomas Public Art Centre. Her work has been shown in galleries in London, Toronto & Bancroft. Elizabeth's work is diverse, ranging from portraits to landscapes, water, figurative t still life. Capturing the light in a subject is the artist's main goal. Her work can be found in private collections around the globe.