User:Johvgel/Wilfred W. Gelder

Wilfred W. Gelder (1917- ) Canadian Artist born in Portsmouth, England, the son of a Royal Navy seaman. He immigrated to Canada in 1948 settling in the town of Streetsville, now part of the city of Mississauga, where as proprietor and resident artist of Gelder's Fine Arts he established a reputation for painting natural landscapes dipicting the surrounding community, especially the area around the Credit River.

Early Years
Gelder grew up among the villages of West Yorkshire and attended King James School in Almondbury and Huddersfield Technical College. He showed an early interest in art but was persuaded to enter a more practical profession and became a chartered accountant. From 1940 to 1948 he served in the British Army, travelling to South Africa, India and Italy. His three years in India (Calcutta) left a particulary strong impression and he began practicing Yoga and became a vegitarian. At the end of the war, while stationed in Italy (Rome), he met his future bride Ermalinda Ruotolo whose maternal family (Morianni) were themselves noted artists and painters with lonstanding connections to the Italian artistic community.

Settling in Canada
At the time of his immigration, Streetsville was a small town of 750 people located on the banks of the Credit River. A nature lover, Gelder roamed for many years through the Credit Valley, which remained largely isolated from city life until the sixties. In 1960, Gelder purchased a small store in Streetsville and began importing and selling art from Europe to meet the demand from new immigrants. Demand for Italian scenes was particularly strong and Gelder became the major Canadian dealer for noted Italian seascape painter Guido Odierna.

W.W. Gelder, the Artist
As his art business grew, Gelder began to develop his own latent artistic talents, working in various media before finally concentrating on oil and acrylic painting and ink drawings. His passion for painting landscapes depicting the area's natural surroundings soon caught the attention of the local populace and demand for his work began to soar. He painted steadily from the early sixties to 2010 when for health reasons he was finally forced to give up painting.

His art business, Gelder's Fine Art, Streetsville, operated for 50 years (from 1960 to 2010). During this time Gelder produced and sold well over 1000 works. His gallery became a mecca of sorts for local artists, art lovers, students and assorted passers by. Gelder could often be seen in the store's window labouring over his most recent project. Over the years, many of his students have become budding artists in their own right.

Community Involvement and Activist
Gelder held a strong interest in his community. He developed design proposals for improving Streetsville's main square and created a humanistic design for Missisauga's city centre which was presented to Council in the early years of the city's planning and development. Gelder was an active member of the Streetsville Business Improvement Association (BIA) receiving numerous awards and accolades including Businessperson of the Year. A lover of animals and nature, one of his paintings "The Cull" painted in protest over a proposed city cull of the Canada Goose population, received local media attention which contributed to a decision to abandon the plan in favour of relocation.

The Gelder Legacy
The Gelder name has been associated with art since the days of Rembrandt, when 14 year old Aert de Gelder was apprenticed to the great "maestro" serving him faithfully until his death.

W.W. Gelder leaves behind an enourmous body of work which captures the beauty and flavour of small town Ontario, Canada at a time when big city development was beginning its encrouchment into our natural spaces. Gelder's love of nature lives on in his work and is also reflected in a book of original poetry entitled Poems by Wilfred W. Gelder published by his family in honour of his 93rd birthday.