Selwyn Dewdney (1909-1979) was a London-based artist responsible for a number of murals. Dewdney was born in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan and later attended the University of Toronto and the Ontario College of Education, where he received a High School Assistant’s Certificate and Art Specialists Certificate. Before moving to London, he also studied at the Ontario College of Art.

One of the murals he painted was for the Electro-Motive Division of General Motors at its plant on Oxford Street in London. With the closure of the facility, the mural was donated to Museum London in 2012. The mural depicts scenes from a Canadian diesel rail experience from the west coast to the east coast. The mural was divided into three main panels located on three walls of the entrance foyer.

The murals are described by London newspaper columnist James Reaney as;

“Bold, muscular, epic, bustling, urban. Vast in their landscapes. A tribute to Canada in the early 1950s, when moving across the country sea-to-sea still meant a ground game by road or rail on a big scale. A tribute to the locomotives and other big vehicles produced at the London plant for decades after it first flourished under the General Motors Diesel banner more than 60 years ago”

Some of his other local murals are located at Victoria Hospital, London Life, Odeon Theatre, and Sir Adam Beck Collegiate in London. Elsewhere in Ontario there are murals in the boardroom at the Bank of Nova Scotia at King and Bay in Toronto, and Waterloo Trust in Kitchener.