At the quiet crossroads of Highways 7 and 67, just east of Stonewall, Manitoba, a modest monument and roadside rest area pay tribute to one of Canada’s most distinctive twentieth-century artists. The William Kurelek Monument was erected in August 2015 in the Rural Municipality of Rockwood, marking the prairie landscape that shaped the imagination of painter William Kurelek (1927–1977).
Picnic tables on site invite travellers to stop, stretch, and take in the same flat horizon that filled his canvases.
The Artist
Born at Whitford, Alberta, near Edmonton, Kurelek moved with his parents to Stonewall at an early age and grew up there, attending Victoria School. He earned an Arts degree from the University of Manitoba in 1949, then briefly studied at the Ontario College of Art before hitch-hiking to Mexico in search of a teacher. When that search failed, he returned to Canada, worked as a lumberjack, and eventually moved to England, where he began painting seriously after admitting himself to a London mental institution.
His life took a decisive turn in 1959. Having converted to Catholicism, he returned to Toronto, where his paintings went on to illustrate many books, sometimes accompanying his own writing. He frequently returned to scenes of his Manitoba childhood, most famously in A Prairie Boy’s Winter (1973). Honours followed: a University of Manitoba Distinguished Alumni Award in 1975 and induction into the Order of Canada in 1976. He died in Toronto on 3 November 1977, and his autobiography, Someone With Me, was published posthumously in 1980.
The Monument
The site is unassuming but thoughtfully placed. Rather than a grand civic statue, it offers a quiet pull-off with picnic tables, a fitting tribute to an artist whose subject was the everyday prairie rather than its monuments.
Its location at the junction of PTH 7 and PTH 67 (N50.13843, W97.25384) sits among the fields, fence lines, and snow-laden farmyards Kurelek painted again and again, just outside Stonewall, the town that raised him.
The Surrounding Area
The Rural Municipality of Rockwood was incorporated on 14 February 1880 and today covers roughly 1,200 square kilometres of the Interlake region north of Winnipeg. Its constituent communities include Argyle, Balmoral, Foxton, Gunton, Komarno, Pleasant Home, Stonewall, Stony Mountain, Teulon, Wavy Bank, and Williams, a patchwork of farming villages, limestone-quarry towns, and Ukrainian-settler communities that shaped the region’s character.
That settler heritage is central to Kurelek’s work.
The son of Ukrainian immigrants, he grew up in a Rockwood stitched together by Anglo-Scottish farmers, Icelandic settlers further north, and Ukrainian families like his own. Rockwood’s population grew steadily from 1,600 in 1871 to 8,440 by 2021, but the rural feel of Kurelek’s boyhood persists at this crossroads. Pull over, sit at one of the tables, and you’re looking at the world he spent his life painting.
