Gundega Cenne

Gundega Aria Janfelds was born in Riga, the daughter of Valentins Janfelds and Hilda-Alma Freimanis Janfelds.[1] Her family left Latvia in 1945, lived in a displaced persons camp in Germany, and moved to Montreal in 1949.[2] She graduated from Montreal High School for Girls. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Sir George Williams University in 1956.[3] She also earned a teaching credential at McGill University, and pursued further art training at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.[4]

Cenne made filmstrip illustrations for the Montreal Protestant School Board when she was still a teenager.[2][5] She illustrated a 1954 French-language textbook, Jouons Book 1.[6] She taught art, and was a member of the Independent Artists' Association of Montreal. She exhibited her paintings in shows in Montreal, Paris, New York,[7] and Toronto as a young woman.[4]

She was a full-time independent artist after she was seriously injured in a car accident in 1963. "I keep my wheelchair condition concealed whenever I am not present, or the public has only seen my photograph," she wrote in 1966, "for I wish to keep my work and my physical condition as two separate entities. I am a painter in my own right, and my physical condition has nothing to do with it."[3] She held a retrospective exhibit in 1969, in Owen Sound, where she lived.[8] In 1975 she was part of a show of six Latvian-Canadian artists at the National Library of Canada.[9] In 1986, her work was exhibited at the Latvian Lutheran Church in Brookline, Massachusetts.[10]

Cenne married orthodontist Ivars Cenne; they had two children, Peter and Lauma.[11] Her daughter, Lauma Kristina Cenne, became a textile artist.[12] Her mother and her husband both died in 2001;[13][14] she died in 2009, aged 76 years, in Ottawa.[15][16]