For Bev Tosh, it began as a labour of love: creating a portrait of her mother as a 1940s war bride on the occasion of her 80th birthday, a likeness rendered in oil from a decades-old photo. But that single painting took the Calgary artist down a path she could never have foreseen.
Eighteen years later, Tosh has amassed more than 150 portraits of women from around the world who married Second World War airmen, soldiers, and sailors and left their home countries to start new lives with men they often barely knew.
