In memoriam Graeme Welch

WELCH, GRAEME

Dec. 15, 1940 – Sept. 7, 2024

Much loved partner of Lucie Genevieve Lambert, brother to Denis, Jenny and David, father of  the late Lisa, grandfather to Jessica and great-grandfather to Elizabeth and Andrew, uncle to  several  nieces and nephews. After a long and painful illness, Graeme died peacefully in the Balfour Mount Palliative Care Unit of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal.

Graeme was a man of great intellectual curiosity; he was well read in many fields  and enjoyed discussing ideas and  events. Born in Masterton, New Zealand in1940, Graeme came to Canada as a young man in 1965. After obtaining a PhD in Chemistry at the University of Toronto in 1969, he moved to Montreal where he was a post-doctoral fellow at McGill University from 1969-1971.

Although he held the position of  Dean of the Faculty of Technology at  Taranaki Polytechnic in New Plymouth, New Zealand  from 1992-2000, the major part of his career was spent in Canada. He taught for some years, first at John Abbott College before moving to Dawson College in 1981 where he was much appreciated in several  senior positions, finally as Dean of Pre-University Studies. He was seriously interested in how the students experienced their education; he was very supportive of innovation at the college.

A man of many talents, in 1985 he completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree (with distinction) at Concordia University. Graeme retired from his position at Dawson College in 2006 to attend to his first great love, painting and drawing.  He rented a studio in St-Henri where he steadily worked on his art, producing  works that were colourful, luminous and intense. While his earlier work included many landscapes, many of his distinctive works drew on memories of growing up in a provincial New Zealand town during the Second World War and after. As he himself wrote about it, his later work  focused specifically on “…complex aspects of the human condition… by drawing the human figure in situations that are a combination of personal experience and the events and ideas of the times through which he lived.” He regarded his work as being about “humour and pathos, sadness and exaltation, violence and indifference…[with] touches of eroticism and irony.”

Graeme’s works were featured in both solo and group exhibitions in Montreal, Ottawa and New Zealand. Most notable was his solo exhibition in 2008 at the Warren G. Flowers Gallery in Dawson College.

A celebration of Graeme’s life will take place in December. The date and place will be announced later.

-Submitted by Greta Hofmann-Nemiroff