it was a business arrangement that remained unwritten. Glimmering Tapers round the Day's Dead Sanctities from 1970 is part of his Nature, Poor Stepdame series, and indicates that he was still building frames for his own paintings though quite renowned as an artist by this time. Canadian artist Kurelek's first exhibition at the Isaac's Gallery was from March 26 to April 7, 1960. The show had 20 paintings. Among them, both his self-portraits (1950, and 1957); 3 Trompe-l'œil, paintings of a kind which had won him a place for three years in succession in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition; Remorse from his hospital period; the Brueghel-like Farm Children's Games in Western Canada, a forerunner of his children's paintings to come; Saw-Sharpener, a look at his days as a lumberjack; When I Have Come Back Home; The Modern Tower of Babel; Behold Man Without God, this last reflecting the beginning of a change in attitude to prayer and the church. Though he was working on his The Passion of Christ According to St. Matthew series by this time, none of these religious paintings were included as they would be unsaleable. Canadian poet John Robert Colombo, for whom Kurelek had recently illustrated his first book of poetry, best describes the opening: "There were a lot of strange looking people, not the usual art crowd. Bill looked terribly out of place at his own opening. He had a reddish complexion and looked like a lumberjack; he looked as if he were in the wrong country, the wrong century, the wrong situation. It didn't look as if he had produced this work!" The Isaacs' popular opening nights drew city sophisticates, affecting the bohemian dress of their day. This time they contrasted sharply with Kurelek, his parents, and their Ukrainian friends. Nonetheless, it was the largest crowd the gallery had ever drawn, and by the following year the Isaac's Gallery had moved into a larger building. In 1961, the women's committee of the Art Gallery of Ontario invited the prestigious Alfred Barr from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City to visit and select a Canadian painting for his museum's collection. At that time abstract expressionism was in vogue. Barr arrived and astonished them by choosing a painting by Kurelek: Hailstorm in Alberta. When the ladies committee telephoned Kurelek to come to the AGO to meet with Barr, he did not even know