Gladys Johnston

Johnston was a self-taught painter; she was also an author, writing local and family history books and travel stories.

[1][2] Johnston spent most of her life in British Columbia, living in Salmon Arm from 1944 until her death in 1983.

As a child on her family's dairy farm she would often draw the team of horses grazing outside her kitchen window.

However, her earliest works predate the marriage, and her color sense and style of paint application was very different from her husband's.

There were many demands on her time as she raised her three sons, kept the household running, and helped with the trapping, log cabin construction and gardening.

[6] The subject matter of Gladys Johnston's paintings deal with the local geography of the places she lived in and around British Columbia, adventure scenes (such as a man in a canoe encountering a bear, a man being thrown from a horse), nature and other homesteading scenes.