Heartland

About Heartland

The internationally acclaimed expressionist, Yehouda Chaki was perhaps best known for his wonderfully vibrant, colourful and imaginative landscapes. Inspired by the natural world, Chaki favoured a bright Fauvist colour palette evident in this oil landscape of rolling hills rendered in golden yellow, burnt orange, cobalt blue, turquoise, deep green and sienna. A signature of Chaki’s work is the remarkable use of colour and light to distinguish form.

“My landscapes are not just landscapes,” he says. “There are never any roads; there is no perspective. There are no telephone poles, no human elements. That is why they are so restful.” Yehouda Chaki

Yehouda Chaki was born in Athens, Greece in 1938. His Jewish parents escaped persecution during WW2 and lived in Tel Aviv from the mid-1940s to 1960. Chaki studied art in Tel Aviv and at the École des beaux-arts in Paris. He married a Canadian student he met in Paris, and in 1962, he immigrated to Montreal where he continued to create his artwork in many genres. A prolific artist, Chaki had more than 100 one-man shows. He was the founder and head of the Saidye Bronfman Centre’s Department of Painting and Drawing, where he taught for 25 years. His works have been collected privately and publicly exhibited in galleries and museums the world over. Chaki died from Parkinson’s in 2023.