Mona Goldman was introduced to the world of art in 1934 at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Saturday morning art classes directed by the Group of Seven’s Arthur Lismer. By the age of 12, she put her painting skills on display by helping her father decorate the Kiever Synagogue in Toronto. Along with her older brother Martin, she painted the signs of the zodiac around the ceiling of the upper gallery .
Graduating early from high school at 16, Mona, at the insistence of her mother, began secretarial classes which led to a job at a small mining engineering company, which she immediately quit upon being accepted to the prestigious Institute of Design in Chicago. As she wrote later in life, “Chicago was stupendous! I was attending the most modern art school in the world, being taught by leading-edge artists of international stature on a dazzling range of subjects.
Before long, she re-entered the art world with a teaching position at UBC but it wasn’t until the 1960s that she began showing, beginning with a solo show at the Bau-Xi Gallery in Vancouver’s Gastown. Over the years, 19 more solo exhibitions followed as she branched out across Canada and the United States with paintings displayed in New York, Toronto, Saskatoon, Manitoba and many other areas.
In the 1980s, Mona started a second career leading UBC-financed art tours to New York, Paris and London. After his retirement, her husband Bill would accompany Mona, often extending their itineraries to include more exotic locales. The tours finally came to an end in 2002 as Mona approached her 80th birthday.
At the turn of the century, she put down her brushes and turned to digital photography, enthusiastically manipulating her images in Photoshop and resulting in still more gallery exhibitions. Approaching her ninth decade, Mona’s imagination continued to be captivated by the beauty of Western Canada where she spent many hours walking the Stanley Park sea wall and photographing the flora of VanDusen Botanical Garden.