The biographer’s job is to blaze a trail through the forest of a life, here following the stream, there climbing the rise, then lingering in the sunny clearing before hacking through a tangled thicket. In Breaking Free: The Story of William Kurelek, May Ebbitt Cutler faces a particularly dense forest. Kurelek left behind a voluminous autobiography, Someone with Me. Patricia Morley’s 1986 biography Kurelek is detailed and comprehensive. Kurelek’s own paintings are deeply autobiographical. And Cutler, founder of Tundra Books, knew William Kurelek as his publisher and friend.

The path that Cutler chooses as one route through Kurelek’s life is the story of overcoming an unhappy childhood. A shy, timid, troubled boy who cannot connect with his own father grows into an intense, odd, depressive man who clings to mental stability through religious faith and artistic expression and eventually achieves international fame as an artist and some peace with his past. Readers of Kurelek’s autobiographical picture books A Prairie Boy’s Winter and Lumberjack will already know pieces of this story but Cutler pulls together, for the young reader, a cohesive narrative.

Her art is the art of selection. For example, she quotes Kurelek describing one hard winter of his childhood, after the crops were destroyed by grasshoppers. “That winter our diet consisted mostly of potatoes.” In 1982, biographer Patricia Morley talked to Kurelek’s mother about this memory. Mrs. Kurelek remembers the winter differently. “There were always fish, berries, mushrooms, vegetables, eggs, chicken, and milk.” Which version is true? The memory of a man whose identity depends on seeing his childhood as a misery, or the memory of a mother who is determined that the record shall show that her children did not suffer? It depends on which trail you are taking through the forest.

One aspect to Kurelek’s life that seems indisputable is that he was saved by his art. Cutler’s biography consists largely of simple glosses on Kurelek’s pictures. In choosing this format she is using a style that she herself invented in the early days of Tundra Books, the visual memoir designed for the young. In books such as Sing Lim’s West Coast Chinese Boy and Shizuye Takashima’s A Child in Prison Camp, Canadian children were introduced to our history and culture through people whose lives were told in pictures with accompanying text. The books looked like picture books but they were in fact an entirely new genre of children’s literature, one that remains the province of Tundra Books to this day.

Cutler’s choice of paintings for this study must have been challenging. Kurelek, an indefatigable obsessive worker, produced over 2,000 paintings in his relatively short life, in a wide variety of styles, from photorealistic paintings of coins to scenes of pain and mayhem, from didactic religious paintings to the work for which he is best known, prairie scenes featuring small solid people going about their lives, dwarfed by huge skies. Cutler concentrates on this latter style in this biography, giving us well-loved images such as the character-filled mess hall from Lumberjack and the lyrical skinny-dipping scene from A Prairie Boy’s Summer. She does, however, in some of the smaller black and white reproductions, give a sense of his darker, more disturbing images such as the painting “ The Maze,” in which Kurelek represents the inside of his brain as a place of torture, ugliness, and violence. The text is friendly, inclusive (Cutler encourages us to think of Kurelek as “Bill” as she does), and gentle.

Reading this book is like walking through a gallery of Kurelek’s works with someone who knows some good stories about him and just invites you to notice details, such as Bill painting his childhood self into a picture.

Looking at these pictures, out of the context of story, reminds us of Cutler’s gift for seeing Kurelek’s potential as an illustrator. The pictures have that rare quality of working equally well on a gallery wall and between the covers of a book. Cutler modestly writes herself out of his story but she was a significant force in his artistic life.

This year, marking 25 years since Kurelek’s death, is a particularly appropriate time to celebrate that partnership and its role in Canadian children’s publishing. Traditionally, juvenile biographies were like the lives of saints. They were filled with anecdotes and inspiration. Latterly, biographers for children are at sea. In the world of Oprah we don’t know how to present adult lives to children. We don’t know what to do with the warts. We don’t know what values are inspiring. Seen in this light William Kurelek presents an ideal subject for a traditional biography for children. Breaking Free is not traditional in its format but it is in spirit. It is studded with anecdote because Kurelek himself made his life into stories. It is inspiring because Kurelek had much in common with the saints. He was deeply religious. He had powerful demons to fight. He lived uneasily in the modern world, espousing and practising such unfashionable values as thrift, self-sacrifice, and moral rectitude. And he prevailed. In a life in which the cards were stacked against him, he found the essentials: a family and work at which he not only succeeded but excelled. His life, as retold by Cutler, could well present a template of optimism for those young people who have their own difficulties making a path through the forest.