The Atlantic Publishers Marketing Association has announced that Lucy Jarvis: Even Stones Have Life has been named one of three finalists for the Best Atlantic-Published Book of the Year Award. Written by curator-writer Roslyn Rosenfeld, Lucy Jarvis: Even Stones Have Life was published in the spring of 2016 by Goose Lane Editions and the Beaverbrook Art Gallery.

Growing out of two exhibitions organized by the Beaverbrook Art Gallery and the UNB Art Centre, the book illuminates an extraordinary woman’s place in Canadian art history and is the first examination of Jarvis’s considerable body of work — what she painted, how she rendered it, and how her art permeated her life and her life permeated her art.  

Writing early in 1962, Lucy Jarvis said she felt “just at the threshold of beginning.”  Having co-founded the UNB Art Centre twenty years earlier and transformed it into a place of creative effervescence, the unstoppable Jarvis decided to set out on her own, studying in Paris and returning to her studio in Pembroke Dyke, near Yarmouth, to paint.  

The work that emerged from this period was nothing short of astonishing. Like Emily Carr on the west coast, Jarvis was single-minded — with a vision all her own. She painted her neighbours, their children, the fishermen and their work, and in later years, the landscape and seascapes of the St. John River and southwest Nova Scotia.  

In this magnificent book, author-curator Roslyn Rosenfeld draws upon Jarvis’s diaries, journals, and correspondence as well as her paintings, drawings, and sketches, hundreds of which emerged from private collections in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia during Rosenfeld’s research for the book.  

Earlier this spring, Lucy Jarvis: Even Stones Have Life was also nominated as a finalist for the New Brunswick Book Award for Non-Fiction.

Also appearing on the list of finalists for this year’s Best Atlantic-Published Book Award are  20 x 20 Twenty Years of Conundrum Press (Conundrum Press) and The Wine Lovers’ Guide to Atlantic Canada (Nimbus Publishing). The award winner will be announced at the Atlantic Book Award Gala on May 18 at 7 pm at Paul O’Regan Hall, Halifax Central Library.