George Markel
1910 - 2006
Explaining how he came to be a folk artist, Markel wrote that one day around 1975, he was shopping and saw a china horse sculpture with a harness on it. The price was over $80—about $350 in 2016. “That was too much for me to pay,” he wrote. “Later on I saw a horse just like the first one in a different store, but they had a Red River Cart with the horse. So I asked him if he would sell them separately. He said he would. So I said, ‘O.K., I will buy the horse. I will try to make the cart.’ So, that’s the way I started making carts and wagons, sleighs, and finally I started carving horse, cows, and bulls.”
Markel participated in numerous group exhibitions, including the Medicine Hat Exhibition and Stampede Visual Arts Show, Buffalo Days in Regina, shows at Canadian Art Galleries in Calgary, and Expo ’86. His works abide in the collections of the Royal Alberta Museum, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Canadian Museum of History.
Markel died in Regina in 2006, twenty-two days before his 96th birthday.