Unity Bainbridge (July 6, 1916 – November 30, 2017) was a Canadian artist and writer of poetry inspired by the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast and its landscape.

Personal life

Unity Bainbridge was born in

Victoria, British Columbia Victoria is the capital city of the Canadian province of British Columbia, on the southern tip of Vancouver Island off Canada's Pacific coast. The city has a population of 91,867, and the Greater Victoria area has a population of 397,237. The ...

. She was also known as Unity Bainbridge Brewster. Her parents were George P. and Deborah Bainbridge. Unity was the eldest of three sisters; her two younger sisters were Ursula Ridgeway and Monica Resnick. She had one daughter, Deborah Ryan. Her niece is

Lynn Johnston Lynn Johnston (born May 28, 1947) is a Canadian cartoonist and author, best known for her newspaper comic strip '' For Better or For Worse''. She was the first woman and first Canadian to win the National Cartoonist Society's Reuben Award. Ea ...

the comic artist of For Better or For Worse Bainbridge married in 1946, moved to San Francisco, CA for five years, then moved back to British Columbia. She was a long-time resident of West Vancouver, British Columbia. She died there on November 30, 2017 at the age of 101.

Education

Bainbridge studied in Vancouver at the then newly formed

Vancouver School of Art Emily Carr University of Art + Design (abbreviated as ECU) is a public art university located in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The university's campus is located within the Great Northern Way Campus in Strathcona. The university is a co ...

from 1932-1936 under Grace Melvin and Charles Hepburn Scott. After graduating from the

, she attended the Cornish School of Art in Seattle briefly but returned to Canada within the year.

Career

After returning from Seattle, Bainbridge made her living as a portrait painter in Vancouver. She felt strongly that portraits should be painted from the source, not from a photograph. This lead her to eventually start traveling around British Columbia painting portraits of people during the summers and then returning to Vancouver in the fall. She was especially drawn to paint portraits of the native community of northern B.C. In the early 1930s Bainbridge trekked through a vast area of British Columbia's remote wilderness. She preferred to work alone and shunned most art groups. She was invited to join the Canadian Portrait Academy as a Founding Academician, but declined this offer. She met

Lawren Harris Lawren Stewart Harris LL. D. (October 23, 1885 – January 29, 1970) was a Canadian painter, best known as a leading member of the Group of Seven. He played a key role as a catalyst in Canadian art and as a visionary in Canadian landscape art. ...

in Vancouver in the 1930s and A.Y. Jackson in Toronto and considered Arthur Lismer and A.Y. Jackson among her many mentors. In 1976-77 she compiled her research and images from repeated trips to communities between Pemberton and

Lillooet Lillooet () is a district municipality in the Squamish-Lillooet region of southwestern British Columbia. The town is on the west shore of the Fraser River immediately north of the Seton River mouth. On BC Highway 99, the locality is by road abo ...

. The works comprise ''Songs of Seton'' and ''Lullaby of Lillooet'', two small books Bainbridge published in limited editions."

Exhibitions

* Royal Canadian Academy Exhibition, 1938 * Seymour Art Gallery, July 2 - August 15, 1986 * Seymour Art Gallery, October 25 - November, 1989 * Seymour Art Gallery, 1990 * Heffel Gallery, ''Early British Columbian Woman Artists'', June 1995. * West Vancouver Museum and Archives, ''Generations: Five Decades of Art in West Vancouver'', 1999. * Ferry Building Gallery, West Vancouver, BC. ''Beauty is all there is: Unity Bainbridge - A Retrospective'', Oct 24, 2017 to Nov 5, 2017. *Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver BC, ''Rapture, Rhythm and the Tree of Life: Emily Carr and her Contemporaries'', December 7, 2019 to June 2020 * Griffin Arts Projects, "Whose Chinatown?" January 29, 2021 to May 1, 2021Vancouver Sun January 30, 2021

Collections

* Buckingham Palace * Canada House, London * Imperial War Museum * Diefenbaker Museum * Vancouver Art Gallery * West Vancouver Memorial Library

Awards

Bainbridge received the

Order of British Columbia The Order of British Columbia (french: Ordre de la Colombie-Britannique) is a civilian honour for merit in the Canadian province of British Columbia. Instituted in 1989 by Lieutenant Governor David Lam, on the advice of the Cabinet under Premier ...

in 1993.

Publications

Artists' Books

* Songs of Seton (1975–76) * Lullaby of Lillooet (1977) *The Madonna of the Weeping Willow Tree and Other Moods (date unknown)

Group Exhibition Catalogue

* Seymour Art Gallery: A North Shore Beginning (1990)

References

External links

Portraits of the graduating class, drawn by E.J Hughes, including Unity Bainbridge, for the 1936 issue of Behind the Palette, an annual of the Vancouver School of Art
Retrieved March 8, 2019. {{DEFAULTSORT:Bainbridge, Unity 1916 births 2017 deaths 20th-century Canadian poets 20th-century Canadian women writers Artists from Vancouver Artists from Victoria, British Columbia Canadian centenarians Canadian women painters Canadian women poets Emily Carr University of Art and Design alumni Members of the Order of British Columbia Writers from Vancouver Writers from Victoria, British Columbia Women centenarians Canadian portrait painters