Gertrude "Trudy" Doyle

Canadian landscape and seascape artist Trudy Doyle, 82, of Seeley's Bay and Gananoque, Ont., died March 27, 2005 at St. Mary's of the Lake Hospital, Kingston, Ont., of natural causes.

Born Gertrude Shorter in Coventry, England, she moved to Canada in 1951, with her husband James Bernard Doyle, 80, who transferred from the Royal Navy to the Royal Canadian Navy after the Second World War.

Trudy won the first of her several art scholarships at the age of 12, studying in Britain under Royal Academicians Walter Ashworth and Victor Candey. She twice won the U.K.'s Sir Thomas White award for artistic excellence. She was also an opera lover and a cellist.

Coventry, in the UK's industrial Midlands, was routinely carpet-bombed by German forces during the Second World War and her father, the late Stephen Shorter, a flier in the First World War and a Home Guard member during the second, built his family a self-contained bomb shelter in their back yard, under a fish and turtle pond. Trudy was seconded to the UK defence design bureau during the war and would regularly walk to that job from the home, or the bomb shelter. "You would go to work and rows of buildings that had been there the day before were gone," she recalled more than once.

Her family had briefly lived in Alberta between the two world wars and she had studied at the same Alberta grade school as her future husband, although she was a year ahead of him and never recalled meeting him at school.

What they had in common was a teaching nun named Sister Fostina, who gave Jim Doyle Trudy's address when she heard that he was shipping out to join the Royal Navy in 1939, at the age of 15, being underage for Canadian forces. Jim Doyle looked up Trudy Shorter when he was granted shore leave and they corresponded throughout the war, marrying soon after it was over at a time when Trudy had started a career as a jewelry designer. She designed her own wedding and engagement ring set, among other works.

New to Nova Scotia, Trudy became enthralled by the seascapes and picturesque fishing villages, which were a sharp contrast to her home country. The rugged atmosphere inspired her to pursue her renewed interest in oil painting. She developed a particular lively style of her own, using palette knives to apply the oil paint to canvas or board. At the same time, she started a family, raising six children, all born within a ten-year period.

Without really planning it, she emerged a precursor to the modern career-track mother, not simply painting and raising a family simultaneously, but often handling all the logistics when her husband was away at sea with the fleet. Thus, a car loaded with six infants or young children, driven by a mother for the purpose of simply picking up groceries was a frequent sight around Halifax.

When her husband retired from the Canadian Navy in the early 1960s, he became a journalist, first for the Canadian Press wire service in Halifax, then the Kingston Whig Standard, and later news editor of the Catholic Register, (then known as the Canadian Register). The family set up a home between Gananoque and Kingston On Highway 2 and Trudy began to paint Ontario and Atlantic Canada scenes, exhibiting at her home's art gallery. Her wide range included various paintings of historic limestone buildings and scenes in Kingston, bridges and ponds in Gananoque, the Thousand Islands Bridge, and scenes from Ottawa and the Ottawa Valley. One of her favorite paintings, showing the Parliament Buildings from a frozen Rideau Canal, hung for years at the Canadian Embassy in the Washington, DC. Her works were regularly exhibited at Studio Coleen on the Sparks St. Mall in Ottawa and at Rye Cove Galleries, Tantallon, N.S. Others entered private collections across the country and around the world. She has had numerous solo exhibitions in Canadian cities as well as York, Coventry, Plymouth and Stratford-upon-Avon in the UK. Certain oil paintings were reproduced as limited edition, numbered prints, which attracted an international following.