By 1968, Allen Sapp had adopted entirely the medium of acrylic and he began to focus on themes familiar to him. In Kids at School, an early investigation into this medium, the cool, muted palette is heightened by deft licks of pure red and sapphire blue, which flicker and illuminate the canvas and draw our eye toward the frenzy of children in the distance. In 1969 at his show opening at the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon, the artist’s former teacher, Wynona Mulcaster, commented that Sapp’s paintings “tell of a life on the Indian [sic] reserve, as seen by a sensitive man.” She continues, “With remarkable observation, they record the way it is [...] with freshness and complete honesty. His paintings are marked by a very personal kind of realism that is the result of his total involvement with everything he paints[;] the people, the landscape, the animals. He knows and loves them [1]”.

1. Grant McEwan, Portraits from the Plains, (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ltd., 1971), p. 286-7