Duncan, Alma, 1917-2004 : Alma Mary Duncan was born in Paris, Ontario, in October 1917, and attended high school in Hamilton and Montreal. During the 1940s, she attended life drawing classes given by Ernst Neumann and Goodridge Roberts and undertook a project to record the Canadian war effort through drawings made in arms factories and shipyards; this work is now held in the Canadian War Museum. She was on the executive of the Federation of Canadian Artists, 1942-1943, and was treasurer of the Writers', Artists' and Broadcasters' War Council. She was invited to join the Graphic Division of the National Film Board in November 1943, working first with the Information Display department and then with the Animation department.
After the Second World War, Alma Duncan produced Folksong Fantasy as an independent producer under contract for the National Film Board and, in 1951, she and Audrey McLaren established a film production company called Dunclaren Productions. After Dunclaren ceased its activities in 1960, Duncan concentrated on her work as a painter and graphic artist, regularly exhibiting in group shows. She had begun working as a commercial artist in Montreal in the 1930s, and throughout her career she regularly had commissions for graphic work, creating, for instance, an advertisement for Captain Morgan Rum and illustrating the textbook Le Français vivant. In 1949, she gave a course on the Visual Presentation of Ideas for Macdonald College in Montreal and she taught painting and drawing at the Ottawa School of Art, 1962-1966, as well as at various art clubs in the Ottawa area.
In 1970, Duncan was commissioned by the Canada Post Office to design a series of stamps, The Maple in Four Seasons, followed by a series of floral aerogrammes. Much of Duncan's work reflects her interest in nature, and she and Audrey McLaren owned property in the Ottawa Valley where Duncan often sketched. She was also interested in industrial subjects, dating back to her Second World War project, and the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, mounted a travelling retrospective of her industrial drawings in 1987. A third enduring interest was the Canadian north, the setting for Dunlaren's award-winning film, Kumak the Sleepy Hunter, in 1953. In 1975, Duncan spent two months on a sketching trip to Ellesmere and Baffin Islands. She was a founding director of the Atai Arctic Creative Development Foundation.
Alma Duncan died in Ottawa in December, 2004.
McNamara, Helen, 1919-2007 : Helen McNamara was born in Galt, Ontario, on 30 November 1919. McNamara carved a significant career for herself within the male-dominated world of 1940s journalism. She worked as a music critic, with a particular interest in jazz, for the Toronto Telegram and for Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) radio, and also wrote for CBC television and as a freelancer for many music journals. With Jack Lomas, McNamara compiled The Bands Canadians Danced To (1973), a book on the dance band scene in Canada from the 1920s to the 1950s. McNamara's career brought her into contact with some of the leading jazz musicians of her day, among them her friends Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Oscar Peterson, and Jimmy Rushing. A first cousin to the Canadian artist Alma Duncan, McNamara in her later years became an accomplished visual artist, working in pastels, watercolours, and pen and ink. She died in Toronto on 23 December 2007.
