A pair of Alberta coal miners are painted mining a coal seem by hand, with pick axe and wheelbarrow. The painting then blends into a logging crew floating a log boom down river (known as log driving); the loggers standing on the logs they're working in cork boots, with peaveys and pike poles.
Fist Nations peoples utilized Alberta resources long before Europeans arrived, like this painting of a spring fishing camp, where walleye and pike are caught and prepared with stone tools at a northern stream. Fish that are not cooked or smoked are placed on wood racks to dry in the sun, while nearby two people seal a birch bark canoe with spruce pitch and bitumen.
A farmer operates a steam driven threshing machine, with a water barrel nearby for fire prevention, in a threshing operation on a family farm at the turn of the century in Alberta. In the background of the painting a crew of farmhands is briefly relieved of their hard work pitching sheaves, raking grain, and other wheat harvest jobs.
On a cold day 70 years ago in Devon, Alberta, a drilling crew at the Leduc No. 1 well hit a rich oil deposit that forever changed Alberta. Leduc No. 1 was important for a painting about Alberta's industries, as it was a major economic event that led to Canada being the tenth largest oil producing nation.
ATB Financial wanted a visual summary of Alberta's industrial history in an artwork, from First Nation's peoples fishing to modern oil and gas. The painting is used as a reminder of the institution's blue-collar clientele; that regular working people built the province to what it is today.
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