Greta Dale facts for kids

Greta Dale (1929–1978) was a Canadian artist who created large sculptures on walls, called murals. She made many artworks for public and private buildings in Canada and the United States. One of her most famous works is the mural in the main lobby of the Centennial Concert Hall in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

About Greta Dale's Life

Greta Dale was born Margreta Lundberg in Kelowna, British Columbia, in 1929. She studied art at the Ontario College of Art from about 1949 to 1953. There, she met photographer and architect Jack Dale, and painter Jack Akroyd.

In 1953, Greta moved to Vancouver with Jack Dale, and they soon got married. By 1956, they had two children. Like many Canadian artists, Greta Dale decided to study art outside of Canada. Around 1959, she received a grant to study for a year in Mexico. She went with her young family to learn from the famous mural artist José Chávez Morado. In Mexico, she also discovered the shapes and textures of Mayan buildings. These ancient designs later inspired her own sculptural style, especially in her ceramic artworks.

Greta Dale's Art Career

After returning to Vancouver, Greta Dale completed two public mural projects. One was a special kind of drawing called sgraffito at 2033 Comox, Vancouver. It was recently fixed up in 2014. Another mural showed industries from British Columbia. It was made using a painting method called encaustic for Johnston Heights Secondary School in Surrey, B.C. These early works showed how much she was influenced by Mexican mural art.

Dale and her new partner, architect W.R. (Wilfrid) Ussner, then left British Columbia. They lived in Toronto throughout the 1960s, except for a short time in Montreal from 1962 to 1963. They also traveled to Europe and Mexico. Dale and Ussner often worked together. Ussner's building projects gave Dale chances to create relief murals. Dale, in turn, helped his clients who wanted to add art to their buildings. By the mid-1960s, Dale had completed fourteen murals in central Canada and Spain. She used different materials like clay, stained glass, sand casting, concrete, and encaustic.

Creating Ceramic Murals

Greta Dale: Untitled Mural, Manitoba Centennial Concert Hall, 1967

Greta Dale's first known ceramic art project was for the Briarwood Presbyterian Church in Beaconsfield, Quebec, around 1963. She likely got this job through people she met while in Montreal. She made abstract clay designs for the baptismal font, the lectern, and the front doors. She worked from a basement studio in her Toronto home, using rough clay from Mississauga. Dale also completed at least two other projects in Montreal churches. These included ceramic panels for windows, a sculpted altar, and a twelve-foot Stations of the Cross artwork.

Dale's first big non-religious ceramic project was made in 1964-65 for Sarco Canada's new building in Toronto. This building was designed by Ussner. The mural had detailed surfaces of cut bricks with abstract figures, meant to show "sympathy for man." It was clearly inspired by Mayan architecture, which had recently been uncovered. The mural was made of unglazed and glazed brick and sculpted stoneware. It had many colors like red, orange, grey, purple, blue, and turquoise. This five hundred square foot mural covered a wall in the entrance to Sarco's Toronto offices.

A year later, art critic Anita Aarons featured this project. She included it in an exhibition catalog about Dale's ceramic murals. This catalog was published with the University of Toronto and the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. Aarons also included Dale in a 1967 art and architecture exhibition. They even did a radio interview together about how important it is to combine art and architecture.

Dale's last and largest ceramic artwork was for the Centennial Concert Hall in Winnipeg in 1967. This huge mural weighed five tons and measured twenty-five hundred square feet (25 feet by 10 feet). It was one of four artworks chosen for the building's inside. Dale was the only artist chosen who did not have strong connections to Manitoba. Her past experience helped her manage all the steps, from submitting her ideas in 1966 to installing the final work in January 1968.

The mural was divided into four main parts. Three circular sections showed figures representing dance, music, and drama. One horizontal section included people who worked backstage and the audience. To design and build this mural, Dale used bricks as her main material. She cut the clay bricks to different heights. She also cut and shaped wet clay to create architectural forms around her sculpted figures. These figures were made with strong, expressive cuts and pushes.

Later Artworks

In 1969, Dale received a grant from the Canada Council to continue her studies in Mexico. There, she started working with fibreglass. She liked this material because it was more flexible than clay. Her experiments led to a mural for the Winnipeg Planetarium. This black artwork, made of three panels, showed the universe. It was part of Manitoba's 1970 provincial centennial celebrations. This mural has since been moved and stored at the planetarium.

Dale's next project was a more colorful and abstract fibreglass mural. It measured 6 by 27 feet. She designed it for the lobby of the Royal St. Andrew apartment building in Sarasota, Florida. Its colors ranged from blue to purple. She used a technique with wax, which was a return to the encaustic method she had used ten years earlier.

In March 1970, a fire badly damaged Dale's studio in Toronto. She lost her kiln and art supplies. She had to move to Jarvis Street in a former Salvation Army office. There, she continued her fibreglass work. Her last known relief sculpture was a fibreglass piece for the Greenblade Junior High School in Mississauga, Ontario. This thirty-inch wide mural was made in three vertical sections and reached a second-floor balcony. It was colored in shades of blue and designed with openings so children could touch and interact with it. After finishing this mural, Dale said she wanted to focus on painting.

Greta Dale's Impact

Greta Dale understood the challenges of combining art and architecture. In interviews, she explained that artists working with buildings needed a lot of knowledge. They had to consider the light, color, shapes, textures, and even humidity of the space. They also needed to know about different installation materials and techniques. She believed her artworks should fit perfectly with the building, not just be placed there. She wanted her art to invite people to look at it and touch it.