Lilias Farley

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Lilias Marianne Ar de Soif Farley (May 2, 1907 – August 2, 1989) was a Canadian painter, sculptor, designer, and muralist who worked in realism and abstraction. In 1967 she received the Centennial Medal for Service to the Nation in the Arts. She was in the first graduating class of the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts (now Emily Carr University) and earned a design diploma in 1929.

Born in Ottawa, she moved to Vancouver with her family in 1924. At the Vancouver school, she studied design with James W. G. Macdonald and drawing with Frederick Horsman Varley, and she was influenced by other artists and designers, including Charles Marega. She also studied architectural sculpture at the University of British Columbia and did post-graduate work in theatre design and puppetry. Her work drew on the ideas of designers and sculptors such as Harry Tauber, Ivan Meštrović, and Richard Teschner. She mainly worked with wood, stone, and mosaic.

By the 1930s she began showing work at the Vancouver Art Gallery and taught design at the British Columbia College of Art from 1933 to 1935. Farley helped found the Federation of Canadian Artists in 1941, led the Pasovas Arts Club in Vancouver, and was elected to the Sculptors Society of Canada in the 1940s. She became a Life Fellow of the International Institute of Arts and Letters in 1960. In 1948 she moved to Whitehorse, Yukon, where she taught at Whitehorse High School until 1972 and served as the first Yukon director for the Canadian Crafts Council (1973–74). She lived in Yukon until her death at 83.

Her public works include two murals with bronze details for the Hotel Vancouver (1939) and carved patterns for the Vancouver Post Office. In Whitehorse she painted the History of the Yukon murals for the Supreme Court Chambers in the Federal Building (1955). In Ottawa she made color plates for the Department of Indian Affairs. She exhibited widely in Canada, including shows with the Pasovas Arts Club, the British Columbia Artists, the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, and other galleries.