Thank you, OAC

There are many reasons why I love Ontario – the great weather that is never monotonous, the low population that preserves wide expanses of nature, free health care,  low crime,  and the freedom women have to become what they want to become.  These are just a few of the reasons.

Today, however, I am particularly grateful for a feature of Ontario that most of you probably don’t even know exists.  Indeed, neither did I, until I took a course called Business Course for Artists at the Haliburton School of the Arts. I am grateful for the Ontario Arts Council.

OAC fosters and supports the arts in Ontario by awarding grants to Ontario artists.  I was the fortunate recipient of an exhibition grant this winter.  In my business course I learned about this grant.  So, when I was invited to exhibit my paintings at the Huntsville Public Library this fall (see previous blog ), I was able to go to OAC for help with the framing of all those paintings.

I had to send my application to a recommender gallery in Ontario, all of whose names are listed on the OAC website.  In my case, I applied to the Art Gallery of Peterborough.  It was this gallery that reviewed my work, my artistic statement, my art resume and the completed application forms.  The Art Gallery of Peterborough recommended me to OAC for one of their grants.   Naturally, I was thrilled to be recommended.

While the average Canadian is reluctant to spend money on the arts, at least we Ontario artists have a wonderful government organization that recognizes the importance of the arts and the contribution artists make to our identity and culture and are ready to help financially with some of the enormous costs of producing art.

Thank you, Ontario Arts Council, for your encouragement and for helping me with my exhibition.  Thank you for improving our quality of life by funding the arts.

If you are an artist in Ontario, check out the OAC website and the list of grants that it awards.  You just might be eligible for one.

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From Cross Lake to Shoe Lake

Cross Lake to Shoe Lake 1981

Planting potatoes in June in Cross Lake, Manitoba, is a dangerous job,  especially in Katherine McKay’s garden.  She lives beyond the Sinclairs’ shack, close to the Narrows where the Nelson River bellows at the shriveled forest and the wind picks up speed for its morning charge through the town.

Raging like an angry bull, Katherine’s husband is leaning over the fence, shouting something unfriendly in Cree, then doubling over with laughter as he points at us gardeners in the enclosure. The villagers had warned us about him.  “He hates white people with a vengeance.”  No trace of Katherine who had ordered the garden.

Brad and I are on our honeymoon.  Book–blearied university students, sick of the stale atmosphere of libraries and labs, and looking for a summer of fresh air and adventure, we impulsively volunteered with a relief organization to create kitchen gardens with the Cree in order to promote local food production, healthy eating and active living, and to decrease dependency on the Hudson’s Bay Store.

Just days after our May wedding, the bush pilot dropped us off with a bag of seeds, rakes, hoes and a rotor tiller.  He promised to pick us up at the end of August, then rattled his plane up into the clouds and was gone.  Swarms of black flies descended to welcome us.  Nobody else.

But that was last month.  Right now, I am shivering in Katherine’s freshly tilled garden, despite three layers of sweaters on my back. But it’s a garden, another precious garden to add to our other three.

Gardens are not a real hot item on this reservation. We’ve tried everything to promote them: a booth in front of the Bay Store, radio announcements, community involvement.  It was only when we dressed up like a tomato and a cob of corn and paraded through town, waving our garden-promoting banner, that a few kind souls took pity on us and signed on.

This morning, however, something other than potato pieces was seeding itself –  a memory.  I recall another village in a forest –  also on a narrows.  Cedar Narrows, Brad had called it.   I visited Dorset two years ago with Brad and his family.  We stayed in a primitive cottage on Shoe Lake.   I did not connect with it then.  Recently moved back to Canada from Europe,  I secretly found the endless, Canadian wilderness terrifying and the cabin awfully dingy.   But here, half a continent away, Dorset and Shoe Lake are reconstructing themselves in my memory, in all of its quaintness and natural beauty.”

“Hey, Brad”, I holler through the wind. “I think I’d like your uncle’s cabin in Dorset now. Could we spend some weekends there this fall and winter?  Would your uncle Gord lend us the key?”

Well, I can quickly see that my comment is setting off firecrackers in Brad’s imagination..  It is taking immediate root and growing into an idea, a whole plan in his mind. Shoe Lake is his favourite place in the world, where he has spent all his summers since he was a baby

“Elizabeth, let’s post-pone our studies for a year. Move to the uncle Gord’s  cabin and spend the year learning about the bush, canoeing, hiking, and hunting, instead. We’ll have time to think, read, paint,  and pursue whatever we want.  We’ll live simply on our savings, get paying jobs next summer, then pick up our university studies,  refreshed.  Anyway, I don’t know if engineering is right for me.

Our reckless and spontaneous plan warms us to the core.  The  Dorset Venture becomes a beacon of light that illuminates every activity with purpose.  Suddenly it is important to learn about survival and the ways of the bush from our Cree neighbours.   We borrow Mother Earth News magazines from George, the Metis, and start eating lambs quarters at lunch and catch fish from the Nelson.   I read about the benefits of cattail silk and sew it into my sleeping bag for warmth, that is,  before I notice the tiny worms in the silk.    After one week, when we feel totally sure about our plan, we phone home.

“What? You’ve gone mad with love.”  “Finish your education first.”  “We don’t like that plan at all.” were the responses.   Uncle Gord was the worst.  “Old Charlie Bean froze in his sleep up there.  Could happen to you.  You could burn the cabin down and no one would even know.  Neither of you are familiar with wood-stoves.  If something happened to you kids up there, I’d carry that guilt around for the rest of my life. “

But, in the fall, he hands over the key when we offer $60.00 a month to rent the cabin and assure him that we’ll keep an eye on his own big cottage.

One cold, October evening, Brad gallantly carries me over the threshold and sets me down in the middle of an uninsulated, dark and damp, mice-infested shack with no running water, except for what is leaking through the holes of the roof and the broken chimney. I hear a strain in Brad’s voice as he welcomes me to my first home.  No surface is without mouse droppings.  Night is falling.  My quivering candle guides me to a musty bed in the corner and I crawl in,  button-lipped. Before I fall asleep,  a mouse runs down my leg.   The luster to our dream is starting to fade.

All of that happened thirty-two years ago.  We cleaned, polished, and patched, that cabin, hauled water, built an outhouse, and made a warm, happy home.  We had a fabulous year and learned a great deal about ourselves and each other, but it will be the subject of another blog.

We did, indeed, go back to our formal studies at university,  and on to our professions, but  we vowed we would return to Dorset to raise our family.  Six years later, we bought the lot with the cabin from Uncle Gord.  Two years after that, we quit our professions and moved back into that cabin with a toddler, Katherine and a newborn, Sarah Jane.   But that story will also have to wait.

Pink Shoes

It’s a rare event that I cave in to buying something frivolous, just for myself.  I have a big, growing family involved in music lessons, a home, a business of my own, my husband’s business.  There is never anything left for foolish indulgence.

The bright pink shoes on the display table were made of the softest leather, leather lined and leather soled.  They were my size and they were on sale. I imagined myself wearing them on Easter Sunday, with my fuschia-coloured dress. I pictured them, casual style, with tight jeans and a bright shirt.  I felt them moulding perfectly to my feet as I met clients in my studio/gallery.   They were like two bright spring tulips in my garden, like two punchy blobs of paint on my palette.  I left the store and dreamed of those shoes for a month.

I blame the barrel for my weakness for unusual shoes.   I must have been eight when my father announced after supper that he had a surprise for us.  We were to wait for it in the living room.  I heard a distant rumbling coming closer to us down the long hallway.  Dad rolled the barrels into the living room, popped off the lids and dumped out the contents all over the living room floor.  Shoes, hundreds of leather shoes, poured out – red, pink, shiny patent black, pointed, squared-toed,  buckled, laced, buttoned, strapless shoes.  It was raining shoes!  Shoes flooded the floor.  The river of shoes flowed down the hallway.

“Help yourselves!”  my father magnanimously offered with a delighted chuckle as my mother gasped in astonishment.  “Harold, what have you done?”

While my siblings and I charged in like hungry children on a plateful of doughnuts, our father explained how the shoe store in town was closing and the owner had offered Father a deal — $5 a barrel of shoes.  It was the ’60s and Father had a big family and was the principal of a private college.  He often had students in need.  So, he bought the whole lot.

But there was one catch.  There were no two shoes that matched exactly.   Some came pretty close, but the shade of brown was slightly different or the buckle on the left shoe was bigger, or the right shoe had two straps instead of one or the left shoe was size 5 and the right was size 7.  It wasn’t that noticeable if you didn’t stand at attention, feet touching.

From then on, whenever I needed a new pair of shoes, I went to the barn instead of the shoe store and rummaged around for a  passable pair.  Often, I had to polish them to make them match better.  Whenever Father’s students or our own friends came over, we would casually offer them a new pair of shoes as if were a glass of water. It was always a frenzied treasure hunt to find the closest match and the best entertainment we could offer our guests.  Over the years the cache of shoes dwindled until the last of them went up in flames the night the barn burned down.

One thing I learned from that barrel of shoes, is flexibility.   You can make do with whatever you have.   With a bit of imagination and some shoe polish you can make things work.  You can put up with a little discomfort for style.

The pink shoes were still there last week – the very last pair on the sale table  They were a little tight, but I knew from experience that that wasn’t a big problem.  The leather would stretch.   They were outrageously pink, extravagant and beautiful and a barrel of fun to wear on Easter Sunday.