Alma Mary Duncan (October 2, 1917 – December 15, 2004) was a Canadian painter, graphic artist, and filmmaker from Paris, Ontario. A prolific artist working in a variety of mediums including charcoal, chalk pastel, ink, watercolour, oil paint, puppetry, and film, Duncan's style evolved drastically over the course of her career to include portraiture, precise representational drawings, machine aesthetic, and abstraction. Early life Alma Duncan was born in the southern Ontario town of Paris, but attended high school in Hamilton, Ontario and Montreal, Quebec. Alma's father, John Duncan, was a textile-firm engineer, exposing Alma to textile factories and influencing her interest in pattern and combinations of realism and abstraction in her later artwork. Though largely self-taught as an artist, she studied with Canadian painter Adam Sheriff Scott as a teenager. Duncan made use of her drawing skills at a commercial art studio from 1936 to 1943, where she drew products for mail-order catalogues, revealing the precision that would show up in other work such as her anatomical drawings at McGill University, where she studied Political Economy. Duncan continued to take life-drawing and portraiture courses in this early stage of her career with Ernst Neumann at the Roberts-Neumann School of Art, which was located in the same building as the commercial art studio, as well as with Goodridge Roberts at the Art Association of Montreal. During this period, Duncan exhibited her artwork regularly at the spring exhibitions at the Art Association of Montreal. In 1941, Alma joined other prominent Montreal artists on the executive of the Quebec branch of the Federation of Canadian Artists (FCA), and attended their first meeting in Kingston, Ontario at Queen's University with 150 artists, curators, and members of the arts community. War work In 1943, the same year she served as treasurer of the Writers', Artists' and Broadcasters' War Council in Montreal, Duncan obtained permission to document the lives of war workers and the members of the Canadian Women's Army Corps with her sketches. Several of these pieces are now held by the Canadian War Museum in its Beaverbrook Collection of War Art. These drawings of machinery sparked Alma's ongoing interest in industrial subject matter, even inspiring her to take leave to draw industrial subjects around Ontario in 1947, while she was working in the animation department at the National Film Board. Film work In 1943, the National Film Board of Canada invited Montreal-based Duncan to