Sandy Heybroek was born in Lloydminster and moved to British
Columbia at the age of four. She lived first at Grand Forks and later at several
places in the Okanagan Valley. In the late nineteen forties she moved to
southern Vancouver Island where she first took up oil painting seriously.
Although largely self-taught, Sandy received some valuable
instruction and criticism of her early works from Leonard Scheu of Laguna Beach,
California, a noted artist and instructor both in the United States and Canada.
In 1963, on a trip with her husband, Bill, Sandy visited several
of the old Indian Villages in the upper Skeena River Region. Here she felt in
love with the beauty and power of the old totem poles. This was previous to the
totem pole restoration project and at that time there were still over sixty
poles, both standing and fallen, to be found between the five main villages.
Since that time Sandy has revisited the Skeena area many times as well as the
majority of old villages to be of the Kwakiutl and Nootka along with the remote
and lonely deserted village sites in the Queen Charlotte Islands of the Haida
peoples. Many of these sites were explored using Sandy and Bill’s own sixteen
foot boat.
Because Sandy refuses to simply copy old photos in archives and
museums and has instead sketched and painted these magnificent carvings from
life, her authentic paintings and brush and ink drawings of the totem poles has
few if any peers. Today she continues to seek out the very few remaining poles
that she has not personally seen and had an opportunity to study and paint.