Up From Garlic Flats
by Vic Cicansky
Paperback
8.5" x 5.5" · 120 pages
Release Date: June 2019
ISBN 9781989274149
“I hope that telling and preserving my Garlic Flats stories will keep the past alive. I want to chronicle what it was like to grow in this place. Life was simpler back then. Basic. No indoor plumbing. We hauled water from a local standpipe. Our houses were simple and functional. We planted big gardens and we ate well. We were people of several cultures, each with its own peculiarities, exuberant inventiveness and unorthodox thinking. We were a family of makers. Our hands were always making things. The prairie landscape and my love of gardening shaped my life and how I look at the world and how I express myself through art. And that is part of this story too.”
Vic Cicansky
Victor Cicansky was born and raised in Regina, Saskatchewan. He is a graduate of the University of Saskatchewan (B.Ed. 1964), the University of Regina (B.A. 1965) and the University of California, Davis (MFA 1970). He also studied at the Haystack Mountain School of Art at Deere Isle, Maine. He taught at the University of Regina for over twenty years, as well as at the Nova Scotia College of Art, the University of California at Davis, and the Banff School of Fine Arts. He is the recipient of many Canada Council grants and many awards including the Victoria and Albert Award for Ceramic Sculpture, the Kingsley Annual Award for Sculpture, the Saskatchewan Order of Merit, The Order of Canada, the Lieutenant Governor’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Regina. Cicansky has had been featured in many solo and group exhibitions across Canada, the U.S.A., Japan and Europe, and he is represented in many major public and private collections.
His sculptures in clay and in bronze reflect his love of the land and his passion for gardening. His work alludes to the natural rhythms of growth, decay, renewal and the wonderful and terrifying power of nature. The sense of wonder he experienced as a young boy while lying face down in a freshly ploughed furrow still leaves him awestruck at the magnitude of the garden’s endless biotic enterprise.
