Dulcie Foo Fat's 50-year retrospective spans glacier peaks to family portraits
At 80, the Calgary artist displays decades of landscape oils and personal studies at Masters Gallery through July 4.
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Calgary artist Dulcie Foo Fat has spent five decades chasing the perfect vista, from helicopter trips to glaciers to multi-day backcountry hikes. At 80, she's distilled that pursuit into a 50-year retrospective now on view at Masters Gallery: "Land and Figure: Paintings by Dulcie Foo Fat," running through July 4.
Foo Fat's practice is deliberate and sparse. She takes many photographs on each outing—hikes through the Kananaskis, the foothills, the mountains—but only one or two or three a year ignite the detailed oil paintings she produces. "I can go on a hike and take photographs and there is nothing that inspires me," she said. Her recent work, a 2025 oil of Durrand Glacier near Revelstoke, came from a helicopter-assisted expedition. Durrand Glacier is one of the more recent pieces in the exhibit, which features everything from an exquisitely detailed 1986 oil capturing dense plants and flowers in Banff to a large-scale 2016 photorealist view from Pigeon Mountain to loving portraits of her granddaughters and an in-progress painting of the Calgary city skyline from Tom Campbell Park.
Foo Fat was born in London and moved to Calgary in 1970 with her husband, France Foo Fat. She earned her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Calgary in 1974. Her work appears in the permanent collections of the Glenbow and Whyte museums, the University of Calgary, and the McMichael Canadian Collection. She draws inspiration from early Renaissance depictions of nature and the abstractions of Jackson Pollock.
The exhibit's earliest piece on display, "Small Kananaskis Landscape #2" from 1986, holds particular meaning: it was commissioned for her closest friend's 40th birthday. "She is sadly deceased, but her daughter took the painting and I think appreciates the painting," Foo Fat said. "So I was happy (to include) it." The exhibition coincides with the publication of her book, "Paintings," which reaches back even further and outlines her meticulous process.
