the fall of that year in the Arts General Course at the University of Manitoba, graduating with his degree in May 1949. By this time the family farm had been sold and his father had moved the family to Vinemount, Ontario near Hamilton. Kurelek had developed an early interest in art, which was not encouraged by his hard-working parents. Despite this, he enrolled at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto. His explanation to his father was that there was money to be made in commercial art. In fact, he had no intention of going into commercial art. During this time, he worked at odd jobs to support himself, such as at a carwash on University Ave. At the OCA, he found himself to be the only student with a university degree. Here, he studied the great contemporary Mexican artists: Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco. His innate appeal and love of murals may have originated in his boyhood, when in his absence his father ventured one day upstairs and into his son's room to discover, much to his horror, the walls covered in unseemly illustrations. Kurelek's friends at the OCA told him about a School of Fine Arts in San Miguel, Mexico, which might grant him a scholarship if he produced something worthwhile. Fired by the thought of studying with one of the great Mexican mural painters, he painted his first self-portrait. Though he studied at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto and at the Instituto Allende in Mexico, he was primarily self-taught from books. Zaporozhian Cossacks, a gift to his father, is the last painting Kurelek did before leaving for Europe for the first time, and shows the influence of the Mexican muralists on his work. England By his mid-twenties he had moved to England. In 1952, suffering from clinical depression and emotional problems, he admitted himself into the Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital in London. There he was treated for schizophrenia. In hospital he painted, producing The Maze, a dark depiction of his tortured youth. His experience in the hospital was documented in the LIFE Science Library book The Mind, published in 1965. In this hospital, Kurelek met an occupational therapist who changed the course of his spiritual life. Margaret Smith brought him a book of poems, wrapped in a dust jacket that she had made of a Catholic newspaper. "I was a staunch atheist at