Artist.
Born at St. James on 21 July 1920, daughter of Florence Lillian Aldridge (1888-1996) and Thomas Wilfred Eugene Stephens (1880-?), she attended St. James Collegiate and Tec Voc High School, where she met Clifford “Cliff” Kowalsky (1915-2004). On 23 December 1939, they married at the Stella Mission and would later have four children.
During the Second World War, she served in the Canadian Women’s Army Corps, training in Ottawa as a telegraph operator, and was stationed in London, England (1944-1945). Upon returning to Canada, she and her husband returned to Winnipeg, living first in St. Vital and later in Charleswood, where they raised their four children. She was a member of Charleswood United Church and Charleswood Legion.
From an early age, she dreamed of being an artist, constantly drawing pictures to give to friends and relatives, following her creative talents. In 1969, she was admitted to the University of Manitoba School of Art, where she completed a four-year degree in Fine Arts with Honours. A prolific artist, she worked on large canvases with emotive colours and strokes. Her early works were documentary in nature, capturing the surrounding landscape, people, and situations. She later evolved her style into large, bold, abstract canvases of brilliant colours and provocative images. In 2014, the Art Gallery of Western Manitoba held a retrospective exhibit of her work, where she was described as:
“… a Manitoba artist whose exploration of the fragility of life overlapped with her passion for gardening. Most active in the 1980s and 90s, Kowalsky inscribed a deep memory of violence into her practice, often suggesting that it was a reflection of her personal experience at the front during World War II. In her painting and installation, she strived to create a language that spoke to the conditions of fragility and trauma without glorifying or portraying violence. Through the use of repeated images of flowers and garden tools, juxtaposed against often jarring titles, Kowalsky created an iconography for these concepts that can be located within the familiar realm often associated with women’s work, while stating that dark histories are often located in the most innocuous spaces.”
She received many awards and accolades and was a member of several artists’ organizations in Canada. Her works have been exhibited widely across Canada and beyond. They represent her unique view of the world, as she broke what she saw into fragments and reassembled it on her canvases.
She died on 16 October 2006 and was buried in the Brookside Cemetery.
Marriage registration [Rosemary Alfred Stephens, Clifford Kowalsky], Manitoba Vital Statistics.
Obituary, Winnipeg Free Press, 21 October 2006.
This page was prepared by Lois Braun.
Page revised: 2 February 2024
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