Nationality Canadian Name Alma Duncan | Role Artist | |
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Born October 1917 Paris, Ontario, Canada Died December 15, 2004, Ottawa, Canada | ||
Catherine Sinclair, “Circling the Essential: Alma Duncan’s Women Series (1964–67)”
Alma Mary Duncan (October 1917 – December 15, 2004) was a Canadian painter, graphic artist, and filmmaker.
Contents
- Catherine Sinclair Circling the Essential Alma Duncans Women Series 196467
- Early life
- War work
- National Film Board
- Dunclaren Productions
- Canada Post
- Later life
- References
Early life
Alma Duncan was born in the southern Ontario town of Paris, but attended high school in Hamilton, Ontario and Montreal, Quebec. Though largely self-taught as an artist, she studied with Canadian painter Adam Sheriff Scott as a teenager and later took studio drawing courses at the Roberts-Neumann School of Art.
War work
In 1943, Duncan obtained permission to document the lives of war workers and the members of the Canadian Women's Army Corps with her sketches. Several of these pieces are now held by the Canadian War Museum in its Beaverbrook Collection of War Art.
National Film Board
In 1943, the National Film Board of Canada invited Duncan to join its Graphics Division. She worked first with the Information Display department, designing posters, publications, and travelling displays for National Film Board projects. She moved to the NFB's Animation Department when the Graphics Division was disbanded and produced her first film, Folksong Fantasy (shown at the 1951 Edinburgh International Film Festival) while under contract with the NFB as an independent producer.
Dunclaren Productions
In 1951, Alma Duncan and her longtime partner, photographer Audrey McLaren, formed the film company Dunclaren Productions. Their first film, Kumak the Sleepy Hunter (1953) was a retelling of an Inuit legend using puppets and a stop-motion animation technique. It was nominated for a BAFTA award in 1954 as a documentary film. They produced two other films, Hearts and Soles (1955), which used the same animation techniques as Kumak, and Friendly Interchange (1959), which was made with chalk drawings. Though the production company never disbanded, it became inactive after 1960.
Canada Post
In 1970, Canada Post commissioned Alma Duncan to design stamps. She produced the series "The Maple in four Seasons" (released in 1971) and the series "Floral Aerogrammes" (released in 1973). Her "Autumn" stamp from the "Maple in four Seasons" series (illustrated right) was selected as the stamp of the month by the Scott Monthly Journal, a periodical from the creators of the Scott catalogue that commented on stamps worldwide.
Later life
From 1960 until her death, most of Alma Duncan's time was devoted to her painting and drawing, much of it done on location near her home outside of Cumberland, Ontario. However, she maintained her interests in both industrial subjects (which began during her World War II project and resulted in a traveling retrospective of her industrial drawings in 1987, mounted by the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario) and the Canadian North (spending two months in 1975 on a sketching trip to Baffin and Ellesmere Islands). Duncan also taught; among her pupils was the printmaker Betty Davison.
She died on December 15, 2004, after a long illness.