The artist

Frantisek Strouhal

He creates the artwork that helps sustain what Global Symphony for a United World does, using a method almost no one alive still practices.

“My work exists to connect with others in contemplation, and peace. It is not static but invites interaction.”

Frantisek Strouhal·from his artist statement

“Strouhal's subjects transcend their physical qualities and evoke an immediate visceral response in the viewer.” Renee Phillips, Director of Manhattan Arts International

Frantisek Strouhal, in round wire glasses, looking toward the camera
Frantisek Strouhal
Frantisek at a lit drafting table, a stag-foot brush in his hand, working ink into a print
At work in Mirage Studio, Winlaw

A lineage that dates to the 1850s

Frantisek was born in Czechoslovakia into a family of painters. Today he works from his studio in Winlaw, in the Slocan Valley, carrying forward a tradition that reaches back to the 1850s, long before photography settled into the crisp medium most people know.

His oil prints begin with a large-format camera and a live model. A watercolour paper is bathed in gelatin and left to dry. A digital negative is laid against the sensitized sheet and contact-printed under ultraviolet light, leaving only a faint ghost of an image on the paper. This faint image is called the matrix. Then the real work begins. Over three to four weeks, Frantisek builds the print by hand, dabbing lithography inks layer upon layer with a stag-foot brush. Colour and depth accumulate slowly until the image feels less like a photograph and more like a painting.

Alongside these painstaking oil prints, Frantisek also makes impressionistic photographs on 35 mm colour film. Two or three original negatives are carefully collaged into a single frame, so that light, colour, and form dissolve into one another. Edges soften. These images carry the same painterly spirit as the oil prints, only now the brush is light itself, and the canvas is film.

An Associate member of the Federation of Canadian Artists, Frantisek has held fourteen solo exhibitions, and his work sits in private collections in Canada, the United States and Europe. His award-winning work has been exhibited internationally, including recognition from Manhattan Arts International for its healing power and luminous use of colour. Through GSUW, he and his wife, Chantal Robert, have built a non-profit that extends this vision, using art to support mindfulness programs, community events, and charitable initiatives throughout the Slocan Valley and beyond.

The craft, moving

Watch the ink go on

Spokane Public Television devoted an episode of Northwest Profiles to Frantisek and his method. It still streams from KSPS PBS. He also filmed the making of a single picture himself, the slow, deliberate work of applying lithography inks to the matrix by hand, layer upon layer, over weeks. His own film plays here, and the broadcast plays from the station that made it.

Northwest Profiles, KSPS PBS, 2016 · plays from the broadcaster

Inside the studio, filmed by the artist · music, no narration

Where the work was exhibited

A selection from his own record, which runs from Winlaw to Manhattan, Miami and Brussels. The full list lives on his artist site.

  1. 2018 Solo exhibition, Art Embracing Awareness, at Mama Sita Cafe and Frog Peak Cafe. Winlaw and Crescent Valley, BC
  2. 2017 Shown in Success at the Federation of Canadian Artists Gallery. Vancouver, BC
  3. 2016 Award of Excellence for New Beginnings, Manhattan Arts International. New York, USA
  4. 2016 Selected for The Healing Power of Art, Manhattan Arts International. New York, USA
  5. 2015 Gold Award for Oasis, Central Okanagan Chapter of the Federation of Canadian Artists. Kelowna, BC
  6. 2015 Shown in Painting on the Edge at the Federation of Canadian Artists Gallery. Vancouver, BC
  7. 2014 Solo exhibition at his own Mirage Studio, and at the Capitol Theatre. Winlaw and Nelson, BC
  8. 2014 Shown in Envisioning Women at the Sydney and Gertrude Zack Gallery. Vancouver, BC
  9. 2013 Solo exhibition, In The Realm of the Senses, at Artifact. Manhattan, New York
  10. 2012 Shown at Red Dot Miami. Miami, Florida
  11. 2011 Shown at Art Expo New York, and awarded two Awards of Merit by the American Juried Art Salon. New York, USA
  12. 2009 Shown in Alternative Processes at PhotoPlace Gallery. Vermont, USA
  13. 2008 Shown in Eurobrom 3, an exhibition of bromoil work. Brussels, Belgium

Twelve years, as the papers reported them

Every line below appeared in a West Kootenay newspaper on the date shown. Where the article is still online, the year takes you to it.

  1. 2026 Recognized with an international award for painting, reported across the West Kootenays. Nelson Star, Castlegar News and Trail Times
  2. 2024 Showing in the Federation of Canadian Artists Signature Associate exhibit. Trail Times
  3. 2024 Featured by the Baltimore-based Artsy Shark gallery. Trail Times
  4. 2023 Exhibited in Painting on the Edge. Trail Times
  5. 2023 Given special recognition at an international exhibit. Trail Times
  6. 2023 Work selected for an online international exhibit. Nelson Star, Castlegar News and Trail Times
  7. 2022 Work selected for an international exhibition. Nelson Star, Castlegar News and Trail Times
  8. 2022 Awarded a silver medal in an international competition. Trail Times
  9. 2021 Shown in an international virtual exhibit. Nelson Star and Castlegar News
  10. 2017 Awarded Signature Member status by the Federation of Canadian Artists. Castlegar News
  11. 2014 Profiled at length as a Kootenay artist working in a rare printmaking tradition. Nelson Star

The work itself

Every picture in the collection is created this way. Each one becomes more than an image, a small contribution to the work of the society and its vision of a more connected world.

See the collectionHow the prints are made