When Bernice Woollam approached the Cowichan Public Art Gallery, she came with an extraordinary offer. Woollam — the widow of world-renowned Dutch artist Will Julsing, who lived in the Cowichan Valley for decades — was offering the gallery a rare opportunity: the chance to acquire 75 paintings spanning her late husband’s career.
“Our thinking was that we wanted Bernice to see it up and together and as a body of work that was going to stay in a public art gallery in perpetuity,” said David Coulson, president of the Cowichan Public Art Gallery Society.
Woollam donated the 75 paintings, most of which had been displayed in her Glenora home, to ensure her husband’s work would remain in the public eye.
“I wanted it to be available for future generations to see and the only place that would happen, would be in a public art gallery,” Woollam told The Discourse in an interview. “I felt utterly, utterly honoured that they wanted to have his work and were able to receive it.”
The work of inventorying, photographing and moving the 75 paintings ahead of the show’s opening in October 2025 took most of the summer, Coulson said.
The art gallery sent a team of curators to Woollam’s house and Julsing’s studio, named the Mariposa, to select the 75 works to be exhibited.
After the exhibition closes at the end of March, the pieces will become part of the gallery’s permanent collection, alongside works by artists Anne Kipling and Zeljko Kujudzic.
“Will meant a lot to me and David (Coulson),” said Anne Brunet, a board member of the society and co-curator of Wayfinder. “It gave us that little extra drive to make sure it happened.”
Wayfinders and Tide Walkers
Born in Nazi-occupied Holland (the Netherlands), Julsing was a world-renowned artist and commercial designer whose career spanned four decades. He immigrated to Canada in 1967 and lived on Vancouver Island, where he painted in his studio until he died in 2006.
His work is primarily oil on canvas, often depicting sinewy androgynous figures lost in self-contemplation. Other pieces portray paintings of the nomadic Maasai in Kenya and Tanzania, portraits of various people and his dog, Opie.
Most of Julsing’s works were left untitled to allow the viewer to interpret the paintings on their own, Woollam explained.
“He believed that when you look at a piece of art, what moves you deeply inside you, that then is what the painting means,” Woollam said.
One prominent series of paintings featured in Wayfinder is called the Tidal Walkers, inspired by Julsing’s time living on the Frisian Islands off the coast of the Netherlands, an area known for its vast tidal mudflats. Inhabitants of the Islands were often forced to cross the mudflats on foot to reach the mainland and devised a system of poles, ropes and platforms to navigate the shifting tides and channels.
“The title that the gallery chose for this show, for his work, speaks to the essence of what he was hoping to do,” Woollam said.
“They take one look at it, and they either go, oh, I can’t stand that, because it shakes them up inside. Or it questions something in them. That’s how his work impacts people,” she said.
“I like to think we all need guides who take us by the hand occasionally or, for that matter, place obstacles in our path so we take a detour and discover a treasure here and there of small truths, or perhaps a challenge to our fate (faith?),” Julsing wrote about the Tidal Walkers series in an excerpt shared by the gallery.
A growing collection
“Our permanent collection is growing faster than the society is, which is a good problem and a bad problem at the same time,” Coulson said in an interview with The Discourse at the gallery.
The upside, he said, is that expanding the collection brings the society a step closer to becoming a certified public art gallery, distinct from a commercial art gallery, which serves to sell artwork. Public art galleries, by contrast, are partially government-funded, host traveling art shows and maintain a collection of works by local and international artists.
“The only missing item we have right now is a paid full-time executive director. As soon as we have a paid employee on board, an executive director or a full-time curator, we gain the full status as a public art gallery,” he said.
The status would open up the door to funding and give the gallery recognition nationally.
“Then larger shows would come to us. We could have King Tut and Picasso shows. We could have all of those here,” he said.
What else is showing at the Cowichan Public Art Gallery?
Along with Julsing’s work, the lower floor of the Cowichan Public Art Gallery is currently showing a different exhibition called Bearing Witness, featuring works by Jeannette Sirois.
Bearing Witness brings together three bodies of work, At the Table: The 2SLGBTQ+, Mortal Coil and large stand alone portraits.
At the Table uses large-scale portraiture to examine how “queer lives are shaped, recorded and regulated through the intertwined systems of law, religion, medicine and bureaucracy,” according to Sirois’ website.
The hyper-realistic portraits were drawn with coloured pencil and based on over 500 reference photographs of models.
A final portrait
As Brunet toured the gallery and spoke with The Discourse about the paintings in it, she stopped in front of a canvas hanging near the front door. It was a painting by Will Julsing.
“This was towards the end of his life,” Brunet said.
One of the few works with a title, the painting is called The Red Chair. It depicts two figures — one standing in the centre of a large space, the other leaning in a doorway. Woollam said the figure in the doorway is her, while the one in the centre is Julsing.
“He is standing all by himself physically — and yet you can see that he almost is in another world.”
To the left of the figure in the door is a melange of colour, which Woollam said represents all of the paintings Julsing created over four decades.
“It’s a painting that says, ‘Here’s your red chair, love. I love you. And I’m leaving you all my work,’” she said.
Wayfinder is showing at the Cowichan Public Art Gallery until March 28 during opening hours, Thursday to Saturday.
