Imants Lapins: an inspiring tale of struggle and achievement

My column in the Ajax/Pickering News Advertiser for March 2011

When meeting Pickering artist, Imants Lapins one finds a modest, gentle, unassuming-looking elderly gentleman; however his life and artistic career is an incredibly inspiring story of struggle, survival and personal and artistic achievement.

Born in Riga, Latvia in 1929, losing his mom at the age of 6 and being just ten when the Second World War broke out around him – with invasions by the Russians, the Germans, then the Russians again, with both countries imposing atrocities on the populace – Lapins drifted through European refugee camps as a teen, eventually ending up in England in 1947. There he worked at various jobs and studied art – a passion from his childhood that naturally came from being the son of a highly artistic mother.

In 1952, he immigrated to Canada and found work as a sod-laying “landscaper” and as a hospital orderly before being hired and trained as an x-ray technologist at Toronto Western Hospital. Eventually he worked his way up to the post of chief of radiology. In the early 1970s, he gained a teaching certificate from Ryerson and began a parallel career teaching radiology .

Meanwhile, Lapins was making art in his spare time, and also managing to take classes: in life drawing and printmaking at the AGO and portrait painting at OCADU; and then he earned a degree in fine art (studio), studying on a part-time basis at U of T. He also joined the Willowdale Group of Artists and participated in their exhibition events.

His first solo show was at the Latvian Cultural Centre in Toronto in 1984 and since moving to Pickering in the early 90s, he has shown at the Ajax Main Library and at the OPG Gallery, as well as group shows with the Latvian artists group, Latvis.

As one might expect from his background, Lapins’ artistic themes mirror the sociological and political upheavals of his early life – mostly reflected in a number of series of etchings – but also in numerous oil paintings. But, he also celebrates the joy he has found in life in pastel florals, oil landscapes and exuberant cubist-like abstracts. He says, “Making art is a way of getting things off my chest, of making life understandable.”

Find contact information and examples of the work of this very accomplished artist at www.lapins-artstudio.com