diary records him still struggling with how to fuse his religious message with his nature paintings. Harry Malcolmson had the answer for him when he gave him a negative review in the next didactic show of 1966. Malcolmson wrote: "satire generally implies making a point by indirection. There is about as much indirection in Kurelek's sledge hammer attack as in the Ten Commandments…. This is not so much an art show as a fire and brimstone sermon exhorting us to right conduct." Kurelek took this criticism to heart and in the didactic shows following, made his paintings subtler and borrowed long poetic titles for them, i.e. from the poet Francis Thompson's poem "The Hound of Heaven" for his Nature, Poor Stepdame series. Thy Young Skyey Blossoms from this series illustrates the more poetic approach to his didactic paintings. Ethnicity Alongside his didactic paintings, Kurelek was also continuing with his more conventional ones, in the fall of 1964 twenty paintings to honour his father, and a couple of years later another to honour his mother, though in the latter he could not restrain sermonizing outright in write-ups for the paintings. His lengthy awkward sermons placed Christianity before the hardship of pioneer women. "Mercifully, the texts had very little circulation, and the paintings were praise indeed for the pioneer women who helped to build this country." Kurelek's awareness of his Ukrainian ethnicity began in 1964 with his first return to the prairies to paint since leaving in 1949. His painting Manitoba Party is at the beginning of this period (he paints himself as a child hiding under the table inside the tent). This growing ethnic awareness in himself was met by a growing social awareness in the Ukrainian community, and in 1965, Anna Balan, Olga Hamara, and Stella Olynyk from the Ukrainian Women's Association of Canada approached him for a series for the Canadian Centennial in 1967, intended to celebrate Ukrainian women and how they helped to shape Canadian pioneer life. The ladies wanted to upgrade their community from the folk arts, and invited Kurelek to help. He titled his series: "Ukrainian Woman Pioneer in Canada". His write-up this time simply thanked the ladies of UWAC for their help along the way with the project. Originally Ukrainian Orthodox, and briefly a professed atheist, Kurelek, converted to the Roman Catholic Church in 1957, by 1959 had started on his St. Matthew's Passion series,