Less than two years ago, Calgary artist Dulcie Foo Fat took an excursion to a spot north of Revelstoke, British Columbia.
While she has been an avid hiker for four decades, the Durrand Glacier is not a place visitors can get to by foot.
So she was flown in by helicopter.
“You drive to Revelstoke and then you helicopter up and that’s the summit,” says Foo Fat, pointing to her 2025 oil on canvas Durrand Glacier at the Masters Gallery last week. “I’ve done a couple of those. I’ve done a few backcountry hikes. If you hike regularly, you find the people who do these backcountry trips for three or four nights.”
Durrand Glacier is one of the more recent pieces in Land and Figure: Paintings by Dulcie Foo Fat, which will be exhibited at the Masters Gallery until July 4. At 80, the artist acknowledges that her days of flying to glaciers in a helicopter may be behind her. But she still hikes and she still attempts to find those perfect vistas and images that can be turned into the handful of detailed, landscape oil paintings she produces each year. Generally, she does not cut corners when looking to the great outdoors for inspiration.
“I take many, many photographs,” says Foo Fat. “Hopefully there will just be one or two or three a year that will give me that source material. I mean, I can go on a hike and take photographs and there is nothing that inspires me.”
Still, capturing two or three beautiful landscapes and portraits a year for 50 years adds up to an impressively large and eclectic body of work. The exhibit features everything from an exquisitely detailed 1986 oil on canvas that captures a dense patch of plants and flowers in Banff, to a large-scale 2016 photorealist oil on canvas titled View from Pigeon Mountain, to loving portraits of her granddaughters, and an in-progress painting of the Calgary city skyline from Tom Campbell Park.
Foo Fat — whose work can be found in the permanent collections of the Glenbow and Whyte museums, the University of Calgary and McMichael Canadian Collection — is inspired by both early Renaissance depictions of nature and the abstractions of Jackson Pollock, offering vibrant use of light and colour.
The 1986 painting, titled Small Kananaskis Landscape #2, is the earliest piece on display in the exhibit and has special meaning for the artist.
“It was a commission for my closest friend’s 40th birthday and she is sadly deceased, but her daughter took the painting and I think appreciates the painting,” Foo Fat says. “So I was happy (to include) it.”
Artist Dulcie Foo Fat’s 2016 oil on canvas View from Pigeon Mountain.
Born in London, England, Foo Fat received a Bachelor of Arts in painting from Reading University in 1969 before moving with her husband, France Foo Fat, to Calgary in 1970. She earned a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Calgary in 1974.
The exhibition coincides with the publication of her book, Paintings. It reaches back even further into her career while outlining her meticulous process. The first image readers will see is a 1966 oil on masonite self-portrait of the artist. There is also a 1977 oil on canvas called Dinner, which depicts a gentle domestic scene of a crowded multi-generational dining room. It is one of a series of paintings that Foo Fat created illustrating being married into a Chinese family.
“They were prescient about emerging trends in feminist subject matter and cultural identity,” writes Mary-Beth Laviolette in the foreword of Paintings. “Quiet and deeply emphatic, this imagery also acknowledges the reality of inter-racial families.”
Still, Foo Fat is likely best known for her depictions of nature, from highly detailed groundscapes to stunning mountain vistas.
While she may be choosey when it comes to deciding which of the landscape images she will transform into a painting, she acknowledges Calgary and Alberta offer an abundance of inspiration.
“I have been hiking for 40 years,” she says. “I’ve said our natural environment and mountains are as beautiful as anywhere in the world. You can travel and have a different experience but this is just as wonderful. It’s exquisite in all seasons. It’s beautiful in the winter, which is a different experience completely. It’s different in the summer. It’s never the same. Some hikes I’ve done several times but it’s not the same hike because the season is different and things grow. You might have gone to a particular location 10 years ago and it’s unrecognizable today.”
Foo Fat says she hasn’t seen some of the work on display at Masters for years, nor has she been the subject of a retrospective that has included such a large sampling of her work. It was the first time the artist has seen the paintings in one room.
“Usually when I finish a painting, I take it to the gallery and sometimes it finds a home and sometimes it goes on the shelf, but I don’t get to see the body of work,” she says. “There were one or two paintings where I forgot the size. Sometimes I forget how big and small my own painting is.
“It’s really interesting. On the whole, I’m happy with my work. Sometimes I think it takes a while to be objective about what you’ve done. Over time, you gain objectivity and maybe what bothered you doesn’t bother you any longer, hopefully.”
Land and Figure: Paintings by Dulcie Foo Fat will be at the Masters Gallery until July 4. The book, Dulcie Foo Fat: Paintings is now available.
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