In this late self-portrait, completed three years before the artist’s death, Kurelek documents himself painting in a red Volkswagen Beetle before an expansive swath of green and extensive prairie sky, on one of the nearly annual summer painting excursions he began making to Western Canada in 1963.

The painting is atypical for its purposeful and unabashedly naive celebration of life, art, and the natural world. We catch a rare and fleeting glimpse of an unguarded Kurelek, immersed in his work and seemingly untroubled by the state of the world.