When St. Albert artist Fran Olynyk set out in 1947 to capture the Alaska Highway on canvas, who knew the capturing would be so literal. Olynyk's gritty painting, Near Rancheria, hangs in the Edmonton Art Gallery today and is part of an ambitious exhibit The Road: Constructing the Alaska Highway The casual viewer might make the mistake of skipping past Olynyk's painting, surrounded as it is by the works of legendary artists A.Y. Jackson and H.G. Glyde. But let me assure you, this would be a mistake. Her painting stands out from the legends, not just for its bold brush strokes of vibrant colour, but also for its fateful realism. Jackson, official war artist and founding member of the Group of Seven, was hired along with Glyde by the National Gallery of Canada to document the construction of the Alaska Highway. Olynyk was dispatched north by her own romantic notions of travel into the newly opened and wild, wild country.

The highway project was launched by the American military after the bombing of Pearl Harbour on Dec. 7, 1941. So worried were the Americans of a Japanese attack launched from Alaska that the U.S. Military decided it needed a route north to meet the threat.

In early 1942, the U.S. and Canada agreed to the joint project and construction began in March. It took over 8 months to do the impossible: build 133 major bridges, place 8,000 culverts and cut though more than 1500 miles of wild landscape. In all, 11,000 military personnel, 16,000 civilians, and 7,000 machines were employed.

Edmonton was a major supply and staging center for the work. Now its art gallery hosts an exhibit that took longer to conceive and mount than the highway itself. The curators traveled far and wide, and up and down the highway, to find the art, artifacts, and documents that now make up this amazing exhibit.

Born in Neudorf,Sask., in 1923, Olynyk didn't take an art course until after high school during teacher training. Later, she enrolled in the Calgary Institute of Technology and Art, where Glyde was head of the art department.

Glyde invited Jackson in to regale students with stories and paintings of their adventures along the Alaska Highway . The romantic vision so captured Olynyk's imagination that in 1947 she headed north with friend and fellow art student Mary Zabolotny.

Before leaving she wrote to A.Y. Jackson for advice. He wrote back in detail on the places to see and art materials to bring along. With army surplus packs, sleeping bags and jackets, the two young women set out by bus. "After that, there was always someone going our way," says Olynyk in a written memoir.

"We slept in trappers' cabins, motels, homes; we fought forest fires, crossed bridges that moments later were swept out by floods; we flew in flimsy aircraft that landed on muskeg; we followed trails that led back into gold mining country."

The two only planned to stay the summer of 1947. But they returned in 1948 to soak in more adventure.

The trip not only left her with 30 or so canvases, countless sketches, and a serious travel bug, but a husband, as well. Olynyk met John along the trail. He'd come north in 1946 with a dream of prospecting.

They eventually had four children and settled in the community of Holyrood, in Edmonton. Olynyk taught school for years and retired from her last post, Alex Taylor school , in 1987.

Olynyk now lives in St. Albert, in a home draped in striking, gorgeous paintings. She's dabbling now in abstracts and hope to keep improving herself as an artist. "I'd like to express myself better-express the emotions that I have."

She says it is "humbling" for her work to be displayed in the exhibit. As for that painting, well she remembers staying at a lodge in Rancheria, near the midway point of the highway, in the summer of 1948.

"We were staying with a nice family and were well rested and well fed, which we weren't usually," she says. "I remember it was a fine summer day and we simply walked down the highway from the lodge".

She'd finished her painting and was packing up her gear when a sudden gust of wind blew the still wet canvas face down onto the gravel of the Alaska Highway . It was covered in grit. "I took my palate knife and took most of it off", she said. "I thought it was ruined, but I kept it."

Good thing. This work of hers is steeped in more than history and personal meaning. Get close enough and you'll see some of the gravel they used to build the Alaska Highway.

Blues, violets, and glowing reds are the predominant colours of Fran Olynyk's Australian Outback series of oil paintings on display this month at Art Beat Gallery. The paintings range in theme from an overview of a rugged landscape, done on two different canvases, to an abstract close-up of the bark of a eucalyptus tree. "I wanted to show the terrain as huge and vast with few people," Olynyk said, as she pointed to her favorite painting Land of Big Sky, which shows a dirt road winding off towards desolate hills.

"When I went to Australia three years ago, they had just had some heavy rains, and we were told the area was green, though it had not been for years, and may never be again. It was a silvery green from the kind of plants that survive draught."

Olynyk works from photographs and sketches she does on scene, as well as her personal diary comments. Land of Big Sky has a sense of mystery, as if in putting it on the canvas, the artist felt the grandeur and majesty of the land. "Nature inspires me, but certain places excite me. In this place I saw the exciting forms in nature".

The Yellow Waters of Billabong shows a flooded area near Darwin, but the subject could be a slough anywhere in the world. Olynyk painted the trees rising from the water, but normally they would be high and dry. All around the trees, the water swirls sluggishly and the only thing missing from this gentle scene is a crocodile or two.

"It was very hot and steamy," Olynyk said, and that heat almost reflects from the surface of her art. Olynyk's painting of the famous monolith of Ayers Rock shows its prehistoric nature. "I walked around the whole base of it," she said, pointing to the bright blue of the sky above the rock. "The sky was an intense blue and hot, hot, hot".

Red Road to Nowhere also examines the emptiness of the landscape, but the work is on two canvases, so the road leads from one painting, across the frames, and onto the second canvas. There, the road swells and grows from a path into a well-traveled but rutted surface.

Her eucalyptus bark series is interesting because, although the colour is somewhat more pink than the red Australian rocks, these abstracts almost appear as landscapes. One work of art is made up of three smaller paintings, as Olynyk attempts to show the layered nature of what she saw.

The Arctic is the Shangri-La of the Canadian psyche. It's a vast, silent space where time stands still-a place where myths and dreams are made. Is there any Canadian who hasn't had the sudden urge to swerve off the beaten track, turn onto the Alaska Highway and drive on and on until the road ends?

Fran Olynyk lived this dream. She took that highway soon after it was built, when northern cities were still frontier towns. And the magic of that time never left her. She seems transported back in time as she recalls a moment from that trip: "We were out on a pier going out into a lake. The northern lights were above us and reflected below in the water. It was like being in a big bowl of lights."

Fifty years later, Olynyk has gone back to paint the north to complete what she started as a young woman. Many of her paintings hang in a group show called Ice and Soleil, which brings the mystery of the north into the midst of the noise and bustle of the Sweetwater Café (courtesy of the Studio Gallery).

"I studied in Calgary with Mr. H.G. Glyde," recounts Olynyk. "At the end of that time, during the war in 1945, Mr. Glyde and A.Y. Jackson (yes, she does mean the Group of Seven's A.Y.Jackson) were commissioned by the Canadian government to record the construction of the Alaska Highway . They shared with us their sketches and for me it fired a desire to see the far north. From that time on I knew I had to go there."

Two years later, Olynyk met another art student who was afflicted with the travel bug. "When you are young, you have a lot of courage," she says. "When I planned this trip I wrote to A.Y. Jackson for advice about where to paint. He wrote back a four page letter describing places that should not be missed, like Muncho Lake. We intended to travel by bus, but someone was always going where we were headed. My kids tell me I was the original hitch-hiker. I never put out my thumb, but people offered to give us rides. We went right up the highway to Anchorage , Fairbanks , Valdez , and from then we flew in a bush plane to Dawson City.

"There were so many places that we had missed that we just couldn't leave," continues Olynyk. But by then her job with an advertising agency in Winnipeg had expired. "It was the best thing that ever happened to me-never regretted it," she laughs. The only problem now was how to earn a living. "I didn't want to ask my parents for money," says Olynyk, who, combined with her friend, had only $20. This financial drawback was amended by several waitressing jobs that conveniently provided a place to live and uniforms. "As we traveled down the highway we paid a lot of bills by painting people's cabins," she adds. They now had a chance to cover all the places that they had missed, and together the two friends traveled up the Yukon River to Whitehorse.

"I met my husband up north. He worked on the pipeline, he was a prospector; getting out into the mountains was his life," says Olynyk. "His diary is now in the archives in Whitehorse. We lived there until 1955, but changes in job circumstances meant that it was time to come outside-outside being any place that is not the Yukon .

Four children, a teaching job and a bout with polio derailed Olynyk's artistic career for decades. "But the desire to get back to it never left me," she says. "I always wanted to go back up north." Fifty years after her original trip, armed with a sketchbook and gum boots, Olynyk departed on an adventure tour aboard a Russian ice-breaker. In a small zodiac, she explored the fjords and maneuvered between ice flows along the shoreline of Greenland and Labrador . "It was definitely not a dress-up place," she laughs. "When you got out, you sometimes had to wade in the water." It was this trip that inspired some of her most current paintings.

The humble tone in which Olynyk recounts her life story show that the spirit of the north is hers to give. "I wanted people to get the feeling that I had," she says. "When you are up there, it is such a vast, overpowering, beautiful country. You feel very small. It brings back the feeling that we are not so important, that we are just a part of nature, a part of the scheme of things."

Fran Boyce Olynyk will receive the Margaret Seelye award in the Senior Advanced Category for her work entered for the juried exhibit in the Alberta Community Art Clubs Association. "The Alberta Community Arts Club Association was started some years ago and has classes all over the province. They have juried exhibits, first at the local area level and then province-wide", Boyce Olynyk explained. She entered a pastel work called Tundra Garden, which depicts a landscape she viewed and photographed in Greenland.
"It's a small painting of the tundra rock, which to me had the colours of a garden. The colours were amazingly bright against the grey rock."

Multiple art genres, multiple St. Albert artists, and multiple artistic themes will be featured at McMullen Gallery at the University of Alberta Hospital for the next few months. The exhibition consists of multiple mediums, dimensions, and artists.

"I painted the multiples I saw in the land," said Fran Boyce Olynyk , who painted the terraces near hot springs in Turkey. Her oil painting shows a barren landscape, where the eroded land is painted blue- grey and sand coloured, while the water ifself looks almost as if a gigantic sapphire was left at the lower end of all the naturally-formed steps.

"It looks as if it is from another world, but the geological formations are very like that. I found the repetition in the land that was carved and eroded over time almost had a rhythmic design," Olynyk explained.

Earlier this summer, fellow St. Albert artist Fran Olynyk was juried in as member of the Alberta Society of Artists. To be accepted as a member of the Alberta Society of Artists you must be working as a professional artist and you must have contributed to the art in your community. The theme for Olynyk's first exhibit as part of this society is My Backyard.

Seven St. Albert artists are exhibiting their work at the Visual Arts Alberta Gallery's Diversity 100 show to celebrate the province's centennial. "These artists have all had their work juried into this prestigious exhibition" said gallery director Allison Argy-Burgess, who explained that the St. Albert artists were among a total of 47 contributing to the exhibit. Olynyk's work, entitled Rock Face, is painted in oils but has a sculptural quality to it. The painting shows a rounded, raw shape to the rock that appears as if it is a hand reaching out of the canvas.

The show will examine the work of the modern day cowboy and juxtapose it with a Canadian's interpretation of the Australian Outback. Saskatchewan born artist, Fran Olynyk's imagination was captured during a recent rip to the Australian Outback. The landscapes reminder her of her own home's vast, vibrant, and unforgiving nature. From there she set out to capture the Australian landscape with oil paints using a Canadian's perspective.

St. Albert Art Walk organizers have discovered that no matter what the weather, people still come out to enjoy the new monthly exhibits at the downtown galleries.

Art Beat Gallery features Fran Olynyk, whose paintings feature the Australian outback.

When The Works Art and Design Festival kicks off in downtown Edmonton this weekend, there will be a distinct St. Albert flavour to at least one of the exhibits.

At least four local artists will have their works displayed in the Alberta Society of Artists' traveling exhibit, Memory and Identity, in the Rice Theatre Lobby in the Citadel Theatre, 9828-101A Avenue.

A St. Albert artist with a painting featured in the exhibit is Frances Olynyk, whose oil painting depicts one of her favourite family vacation spots while growing up.

"I chose a scene from near where I had been brought up, a scene that was important to me as I was growing up--it is the "Qu'Appelle Valley" in Saskatchewan" she says.

Olynyk adds that the piece fits in very nicely with the theme of the exhibit.

The Memory and Identity exhibit will be featured at the Rice Theatre as part of Edmonton's The Works' Art and Design Festival. Exhibiting work in this show is an honour because artists must first be juried in as member of ASA.

The theme allowed artists to explore their artistic individuality as Albertans. Olynyk's Snake Hill is oil on canvas. It show the warm rust colours of the badlands around Drumheller. The hills themselves appear as gentle mounds that look like the humps of dinosaurs basking in the sun. The sky is mauve and brushed out yellow. The painting could depict any time in history, except that a road makes its way through the hills.