Helen Lucas: Aug. 25, 1931 - Nov. 27, 2023
Early admirers of Helen Lucas’s art could scarcely have imagined that her sombre charcoal drawings would one day give way to joyful, giant flower paintings awash in colour. Her son-in-law Frank Simonetti didn’t even know she’d had a charcoal period until two York University PhD students staged a retrospective of Ms. Lucas’s works five years ago. That long-ago dramatic change in her art style marked the end of sorrow and the beginning of joy for her, according to her sister Mary Geatros. “Helen’s early works give you her sadness. She struggled to find her true self, and there were a lot of heartaches along the way,” Ms. Geatros says. “But her floral paintings of later years give the viewer the experience of being alive. She never, ever painted for the sake of painting. It was always personal for her.” Helen Billie Geatros was born Aug. 25, 1931, in Weyburn, Sask., the first of three girls born to Greek immigrants Eftihia and William Geatros. The family moved to Saskatoon weeks later, wh...