Colour of War: Works on Paper from the Canadian War Musuem, 1914 to 1945

Eighty percent of the Canadian War Museum’s 13,000 works of art are on paper, in the form of drawings, prints and watercolours. They date from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day, recording 250 years of Canadian military history. The paintings presented in the exhibition Colours of War demonstrate the quality of work completed in watercolour during the First and Second World Wars, as well as the variety of subjects. Artists from Canada, Britain, and Belgium approached war in many different ways, often finding a tragic beauty in the human and material destruction they witnessed. Many were officially commissioned war artists or painted with specific military units as service artists. Others sketched in their spare time because they had been painters in civilian life

Reflections on the Holocaust: The Holocaust Art of Aba Bayefsky

In July 1997 it was announced that work had begun on the design and construction of a new 16,000 square foot addition to the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, a section of which will be devoted to a memorial Holocaust gallery. The curator of the exhibit, Fred Gaffen, has already been actively searching for photographs, artifacts, documents, memories and recollections which will tell the story of this dark period in human history to all Canadians

Leonard Brooks—War Artist (1911–2011)

Just 13 days after his 100th birthday, Leonard Brooks, a Second World War Canadian artist passed away. Trained as a commercial artist, Brooks joined the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) in 1943 and was appointed an official war artist the following year. He painted scenes of the Royal Canadian Navy on Canada’s east coast, shipboard life on minesweepers, frigates and aircraft carriers and various war scenes in England and France. A total of 113 pieces of his work, “all my children” in his words, are held by the Canadian War Museum