Ivan Olivari passed away peacefully in his sleep on June 12th, 2026. He lived an extraordinary life, filled with colour, expression, connection and possibility.

There are plants that take years to reveal what they truly are. From stark roots, or hidden bulbs, or waiting sprouts, they grow quietly, steadily, their nature expressed not through a single bloom but through the slow accumulation of witnessing the seasons. Ivan Olivari was much like that. A life deserving to be understood gradually, in layers. Through the places he carried within him, the languages that coated his speech, the paintings he left behind across three continents, and even the bags of carefully selected fruit he pressed into the hands of people he loved.

He was born in Meknès, Morocco on December 11th 1947. The oldest child of an Italian father and a Portuguese mother. Two people whose lives had been shaped by war, migration, and the particular resilience of spirit that allows one to cross borders, begin again and find beauty in what remains possible. From the beginning, movement and beauty was his inheritance. The light of Meknès, the geometry of its medinas, the dry desert air and the colours of a North African morning became the first images he would spend a lifetime trying to hold onto, shape, and give away.

He grew, as plants do, toward whatever light was available. A French education, a Baháʼí faith that carried him across oceans, a curiosity that took him from Montreal to New Caledonia, to the green improbable beauty of the South Pacific, the beaches of California, the volcanic geometry of Iceland, and eventually, longer than most, to the familiar coastline of British Columbia. Three daughters were born. Life bloomed from the most specific materials, through Mediterranean songs and stories, Canadian winters and Pacific sun, an untethered dream that kept finding new soil. He spoke French, Italian, Arabic, English, moving between them naturally, without ceremony. Language for him was never a barrier, it was simply a door which he gladly walked through every one he found.

Paintings were his life. He was prolific and restless. For years he captured what he saw, what he remembered, and what he dreamed. They are as much a legacy and testament as they are a record of what made him. His work was never still. It moved the way he moved, carrying always somewhere within it the memory of somewhere else.

He whistled often. Birdsong, hymns, half-remembered melodies, tunes belonging to no particular place or one place so specific you only ever think of him when you hear it. He was a good cook, his palate as eclectic as his life. He tended his plants with the quiet devoted attention he gave to the most beautiful things. He gifted people fruit, a kindness measured through the years by the specificity and quality of his choices. He went antique shopping and found history and oddity that mimicked his own story. He mended things. He laughed frequently and was known for his joie de vivre.

If his life were a song, whistled in the last vestiges of a night, it would carry the sorrow of his mother’s fado, the lift of his father’s bel canto, the warmth of a Moroccan childhood melody, the easy sway of Pacific zouk settling into reggae, the birdsong of a French countryside, wind through Canadian trees, the sound of waves neither ending nor beginning. A song that had traveled too far to belong to any single place and had therefore become entirely its own.

If his life were a painting (a more accurate account he himself might have wanted to give) it would be a living landscape. The dark shadows of night, the restless tinge of morning, the shifting haze of a spring day, the dry crisp air of a desert mirage, the mist settling between valleys, the blooms, the dew drops, the soaring unreplicable expansion of nature in every formation. But it would be his. A mosaic of all that he saw, loved, and lived.

He is survived by his three daughters, his sister, his nieces, his grandchildren and his paintings. His truest record, where each is a place he visited, a colour he couldn’t let go of, a world he wanted to keep.

His work can be found at: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063749023022