Arthur Villeneuve was a Chicoutimi barber who closed his shop to paint because he believed he was following a divine message to paint. He painted over 2000 paintings in his lifetime. He painted brightly coloured, dream-like visions in abstract patterns, based on the landscape of the region from Chicoutimi and Quebec City, sometimes filling them with a ghostly multitude of strange creatures(see Redkettle's classic creatures landscape from '74) . In 1972, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts gave him a one-man show, Arthur Villeneuve's Quebec Chronicles, that was regarded by some as "Canada's most ambitious effort in recognition of Canadian primitives."

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