Musings at Breakfast

This morning at breakfast, my husband put on a Santana CD that we discovered in a box. With a whoosh, the music from the 60’s carried me back to my primary grade school and to the sleep-overs at my best friend’s house. Her name was Cotton.

Now there was an artsy family! Mrs. S and Cotton and her 2 sisters were all artists. They were always making stuff: drawings, paintings, jewelry, paper mache, macramé. They wore fashionable mini skirts, and big earrings, bikinis and low-slung blue jeans.  Mrs. S always had a book and a sketchbook by her side.   She would sit for hours at the table, smoking, sipping wine, talking about colour and travel and dreaming out the window. Rock and roll music throbbed out of the stereo. (Was it Santana?) More than once, I caught Mrs. S dancing with her boyfriend J in the smoky haze that hung in the air. The house was shabby chic, and so were their friends who dropped in. On weekends, they’d go to the drive-in movies. I admired them and their worldly life deeply. When I was 10, Cotton moved away and I lost contact with her and her family.

Nobody in my family smoked and my parents didn’t dance. My two sisters and I wore long, handmade dresses that partially covered the knee, and no jewelry. Sure, we made stuff, too. We learned to sew, garden, and cook. Our meager record collection consisted of hymns by George Beverly Shay and Schumann’s piano concerto in A-major (a favourite to this day.) My mother rarely sat down to rest. We didn’t own a TV and on weekends, we went to church. My family hung out with hard-working, practical, (still very fun and loving) Mennonites. There just was no hope for me as a visual artist.

At first, I missed Cotton. Drawing helped me to feel a connection with her and her family, but I thought less and less about them as time passed.

Forty years later, I visited a relative in Florida. One small painting on her wall was signed Carol S. That was Cotton’s oldest sister!   My hostess had taken a painting course from her in a neighbouring town in Florida. She taught on Thursday mornings.

That Thursday, I was there early and watched Carol set up her class (Was that middle-aged woman really Carol?) before I had the nerve to interrupt her and introduce myself. There was a pause as I watched her reach far back into her memory. “Yes! You were Cotton’s friend. Of course, I remember you!”   We arranged to meet at a café the next day to talk. Cotton and her family had moved to Florida in the early 70’s. Cotton married young, but, soon after her marriage, she was coming home from working late at a restaurant and was hit by a truck and was instantly killed.  Mrs S. was also dead.

We forgot to talk about art.

It’s ironic that I end up being the artist and Cotton of the talented, stereotypically artsy family never got the chance. The injustice and mystery of it hit me anew as I listened to Santana. (What the heck does Santana have to do with reopening these memories?) To what degree did Cotton and her family nudge me into an art career? I will never know. I can just bow my head in reverence to those who cross our paths in life and silently and mysteriously change the direction of our lives or maybe they don’t.

Despite our UNartsy upbringing, three of us four siblings ended up in a career in the fine arts. Who’s to say what the artistic temperament is?

I really must get back to work in the studio.

 

 

 

 

Paintings or Pizza?

Earlier this week, I popped into Partner’s Hall in Huntsville just to check on my solo art show Windows on the World and, fingers crossed, to see if, just maybe, there was another sale.

When I slipped into the exhibition hall, there was an elderly couple on the far side of room, carefully examining my large oil painting of Rooftops in St. John’s, NFLD.   As all the lighting is turned on the paintings, it’s hard to see anything or anyone else clearly. The two silhouettes were deep in a low-voiced discussion that I longed to overhear, but couldn’t.   I banged around self-consciously at the display table that holds my business cards and bio,  trying to look important.

It worked. The couple stopped talking, and said hello, then remarked that I looked like someone who was in charge of the show. Perfect! “Well, actually, (I hesitated modestly for a second to increase the drama), I am the artist. “

 

The effect it produced was very heady stuff: much praise, many compliments, lots of superlatives.  “Where are you from?” they enquired.   “Dorset,” I replied. “Do you know Dorset?” Yes, they had visited Dorset several years ago.   “There was a wonderful wood-fired pizzeria on highway #35 that we went to. Is it still there?” “Yes!”, I answered,  “In fact (dramatic pause again), I own that pizzeria.”

 

The leap from professional painter to owner of a pizza joint was too big a stretch to believe. I could see it in their eyes.   Had I lied to them about being the artist or about owning a pizzeria, or maybe both?  While they were sizing me up, I launched in to defend my outrageous claims. “No, really, I do own Pizza on Earth and run it with my children in the summer. It’s just a seasonal business. I paint the rest of the year. ”    Of course, I added many more details to authenticate myself as both.

That, too, worked and they promised to come to Dorset in the summer to visit the pizzeria. Or, was it a gallery?  It’s both   – your one-stop shopping!  Food for your soul and food for your body.  Is it really that strange a connection?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ruchikatulshyan/2016/03/31/how-to-have-two-successful-careers-at-the-same-time/#b6d9225382d6

 

 

The Ruth Upjohn Memorial Award

Thank you, Muskoka Arts and Crafts for giving me the generous $300 Ruth Upjohn Memorial Award on Friday night.  It is a great honour to receive a gift from Ruth’s estate.  Ruth may be dead, but she is still part of my life.

I first met Ruth Upjohn and Dot Seixus in their simple, old-world cottage in Muskoka.  Their good friend, Anne Schwartz-Buenneman, had hired my young daughters to play classical and fiddling music for Ruth’s birthday.  I was the chauffeur for the event.  What a warm and gracious reception Ruth and Dot gave us!

Then, at the birth of my first son, Anne age me  a book of songs for young children that Ruth’s mother had collected.  Ruth and Dot had compiled these delightful and humorous songs into a book called Sneezepickle’s Songbook.   The hours and hours spent at the piano with Sneezepickle, singing with my young sons, could never be tallied.  We sang and sang –Big Black Cats, the Bus, The Train, The Three LIttle Pigs, the Poly Poly Polar Bears-until our throats were hoarse.

Now I have grandsons.  When they visit, we slide onto the piano bench and sing from Sneezepickle and I am sure to tuck the now tattered songbook into my bag when I visit them in their home.

This winter, my 20 yr. old son came home from university for a visit.  As I was preparing supper, I heard him slowly picking out the simple, catchy Sneezepickle tunes on the piano keys.  Thanks to Ruth for the gift of song and music that three generations of my family are still enjoying, at all ages.

Me with my painting entitled, A ride on the Segwun

Receiving the Ruth Upjohn Memorial Award is a great delight to me and a wonderful honour.  I can’t wait to tell my children what I just received from Sneezepickle!

 

 

 

Camping In January in Algonquin Park

This weekend, I felt like I had fallen into a Group of Seven painting, not unlike the way C.S. Lewis’ and Madeleine L’Engle’s characters get to jump around into past and future eras. When I placed the heavy leather tumpline of a loaded toboggan across my chest, and leaned into the blowing snow, I got sucked into another era, one long before the combustion engine, tourists and Mountain Equipment Coop.

Leaning into the past

I’m just warning you, in case you decide to go winter camping with Craig and Doris MacDonald in Algonquin Park in the middle of January. No slick synthetics, and no  lightweight titanium snowshoes or tents on this trip. Nope. Lash on the old-fashioned babiche and wooden snowshoes with a few feet of lamp wick and follow the ancient trail that the first white man recorded in 1827 near the park’s East Gate, beyond the gargantuan virgin pines. It leads to Sunday Lake where you’ll find Craig, master winter camper and expert on Algonquin Park and on the old ways of the Natives and the traders. He comes from generations of northern postal carriers that were more comfortable in snowshoes battling a blizzard than you and I are in our slippers sitting by a fireplace sipping a latte.

We are eight people camping together in the snow. No slackers allowed. It’s a race against a setting sun. A rough, six foot chisel and two metal pails are handed to my son who heads for the lake. “Don’t forget to pile snow on the top of the filled pails so the water won’t slosh all over your legs. And don’t lose the chisel in the lake!” Doris yells out. Someone searches for firewood and bark. My husband and other son stagger out of the forest and into the campsite after retrieving caber-size poles that Craig lashes together to make a structure to which we tie the locally made Egyptian cotton tent. Before my dazzled eyes, the exact shape of the tent in Tom Thomson’s painting The Tent begins to take shape. It’s cream coloured, spacious and gracefully proportioned.

Doris is showing us how to weave a soft fragrant carpet of balsam boughs, the way the Native people do. Craig and Wayne, who still wears the traditional voyageur garb, hook up the stove whose skinny chimney pipe angles up through a metal square in the gable end of the tent. A fire is crackling and, in no time, the tent is heating up. A toboggan, placed in the centre of the tent, becomes our table. Wooden stakes that hold candles are driven into the ground. Soon, we are sitting in our T-shirts, eating home baked bread and chili and swapping stories of adventure and travel, especially tales of Craig’s interactions with the Natives in years gone by. Before I climb into my sleeping bag, I slip outside. The tent is glowing like an old-fashioned Aladdin lantern turned down low. The snow is hard and crisp and the temperature is dropping as the night darkens. It is dead silent and perfectly still.

So, this is how those Canadian painters did it a hundred years ago. Well, Tom Thomson, there’s still one painter who is thrilled to be camping,  your style, in 2014.

My Solo Exhibition Speech at the Huntsville Public Library, Nov.9, 2012

Walks in Beauty

I  cannot remember the exact moment in my life when I responded to art.  Certainly, the beauty of stark simplicity and things made by hand were givens in my childhood: the bright, patchwork quilts, the thick, braided wool rugs, the jewel-coloured jars of home-canned fruits, jams, relishes and sausages, the vases of flamboyant flowers against a bare, white wall of my Mennonite home – these were some of the moments when I responded to art early on in life. Back then, I had all the time in the world to walk around and stare.

Just how I jumped from these early sensations to becoming a painter, I don’t really understand myself.  I had a little box of paints that my brother had given me.  Just seeing the clean, shiny colours,  smelling the turpentine, and feeling the spring of the brush hairs  thrilled me.  I started looking at the  world differently, dividing everything I saw into little blobs of paint.

While I always struggled with orderliness in my life, somehow the  organizing of shape, colour, texture and pattern on a two-dimensional, clearly defined plane was manageable and terribly exciting.  I felt like I was the conductor of an orchestra –bringing in separate parts to make a splendid, unified picture that sings beauty. Later on, one of my art teachers referred to colours as notes and told me to “Paint like a (wo)man climbing a hill, singing”

I am very honoured to be part of such a great painting tradition, one that stretches back 15 thousand years to the cave painters of France and Spain. It warms my heart to think that we humans still come together to celebrate the act of making marks, one by one, by hand, especially today when computers can make thousands of pictures for us instantly in any style and colour. Art exhibits remind us that we are not machines.  Each little brushstoke made by a human hand is crammed with information about what it is to be a particular human being.    No wonder ancient civilizations thought that art carried magical powers.

And just maybe it does.  After all, angels always seem to pop up whenever I go out painting.  I was shivering one cold autumn day while painting on the front stoop of an old house. I thought no one was home. The door behind me creaked open and someone dropped a warm shawl over my shoulders.

A few weeks ago, I drove past Tally Ho in Hillside on hwy #60.  I have always loved the view of the big garden and the small bight cabins under the big trees.  Since I had my easel with me,  I pulled over to the side of the road and set it up, squeezed out blobs of paint, and was all ready to go, when I realized that I didn’t have any turpentine.  Well, you can’t paint oils without some thinning agent. At that very instant, a car drove up behind me  – the owner of Tally Ho.  She put a call into housekeeping and within minutes, another car drove up and handed me a  jug of turpentine.

Last month, I set up my easel by some unused railway tracks in a rough end of Port Colborne, my hometown.  I was deep in concentration when I heard the flatulating engine of a passing Harley Davidson suddenly stop.  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a leathery, tough-looking dude, heading right for me.

“What are you doing here?” He yelled at me.

I braced myself.

“This is no place for a painter.  Can’t you see there’s garbage all around?”

He was right.  I hadn’t noticed before.  I was even standing in it.  The beauty if the starkness of the houses had absorbed all my interest.   After a good long look at the painting, he burst out laughing.

“Hah!  That’s beautiful!  Imagine that!  You do find beauty in all the garbage and weeds. I live here and I never seen it before.   Hey, can I take your picture?  They won’t believe this.”

“Sure. Go ahead.” I answered, wondering who THEY were.

“Thanks,  he said, “You know, you’ve made my day.

“Thank you, Sir. You have made my day, too,“  I answered.  Away he went, muttering to himself something about finding beauty in the strangest places and I went back to my painting, smiling inside and out.

The challenge for the painter in Muskoka is not the sifting through garbage to find beauty, (at least not yet).  Rather, the challenge is to sort through a surplus of jaw-dropping beauty, ever changing landscapes, to find the little unexpected nugget that, on canvas, will say just enough of what I found to be important about the whole majestic scene.

It is very important to have local, original art hanging in a public library which is dedicated to another form of art – the written word.  Since a picture is worth  a thousand words,  books and visual art are a splendid team that speak truth in different languages.   In fact, it was from literature that I took the title for my show – a poem by Lord Byron entitled, “She Walks in Beauty”.  You walk in beauty, too. The many exhibits that will pass through this library will help you to develop the vision to recognize it  – the beauty of nature, the beauty of the commonplace, the beauty of the abstract, the beauty of the ugly, the beauty of the unexpected.  Painting is a lot about seeing.

One of my teachers was Bill Schultz.  His teacher, Brachman, was a student of the great American painter, Robert Henri, who wrote, “Art in the community has a subtle, unconscious, refining influence.” With art hanging on its walls, the library will become the life-centre of Huntsville from where powerful, stimulating ideas and discussions will radiate, just as Henri predicted of art schools.

I thank the show curator, Mary Rashleigh  and head librarian, Debbie Duce for having the vision to create this venue  for artists to communicate with the public. It’s a great privilege for me to be the first to have my say about my little slice of life and my impressions of it. Thank you to musicians, Josh, Graham and David and a heartfelt thank you to everyone for coming to look at my paintings and to share this celebration with me.

“Walks in Beauty” hangs in the Huntsville Public Library until December 21, 2012

“Walks in Beauty” : Art Exhibition, Nov. 9 – Dec. 21

 

 

 

 

 

I invite you and your friends to the opening of my art exhibit, “Walks in Beauty,” at the Huntsville Public Library, Huntsville, Ontario. The grand opening is next Friday, November 9, 2012, at 6:00 p.m. If you can’t make it then, the exhibit runs until December 21, 2012.

http://www.ejohnsonart.com

 

A Different Kind of Landscape Painting

“All gardening is landscape painting.”

Alexander Pope

My mother grew a huge vegetable garden in which we four children had to put in a certain number of hours of planting, weeding and picking.  My favourite memories of the garden concerned peas.  I loved planting the peas.  They looked like soft green buttons  sewn on the umber-coloured shirt of a sleeping giant,  and I was the seamstress as I dropped each pea- button, one to two inches apart, into the trough.   When they grew into plump pods, I’d eat them raw, cramming whole fistfuls into my mouth.  No snack can compare to those freshly shelled garden peas.   Even the pods were delicious, once you peeled off the inner membrane.

It took me many years to have a vegetable garden of my own.  But now I have one and it is a miracle.   Two years ago, my husband and I purchased the  land on which my husband’s business sits (Portico Timber Frames).   The soil itself is mostly sand and rock – fill that had been dumped into a swamp.   But  the site has sunshine and it is flat, both rare features in Muskoka and the Haliburton Highlands and I began to dream of the possiblility of growing a garden there.    Since the soil grew scruffy weeds, I wondered if it might just grow vegetables, too.  I could just see that desert bloom.

After reading Patricia Lanza’s Lasagna Gardening,  I went to work trying out her no dig, no till, no weeding system of gardening.   After mowing down the weeds and grass, my husband and I built long rectangular boxes with wood from Portico’s scrap pile.  I lined the bottom with 4 sheets of wet, overlapping newspapers to kill the growth.  On top, I dumped layers of manure, coffee grounds from Tim Horton’s, peat moss, chopped leaves,  straw, top soil, compost, anything I could think off that might make a good soil.  Then, I sowed my seeds, flowers and veggies all mixed in together.

Today, it is a verdant, bountiful garden that feeds my family all summer long and provides a quiet and refreshing place where people can stroll and rest in.  Much more has grown up in this garden.  My daughter opened a wood-fired pizzeria in my garden (mypizzaonearth.com).  My new studio opens out onto the garden.  My husband and nephew built an English-style brick pathway and patio in the garden.  My little garden developed further to include a burgeoning Dorset community garden where members meet to garden, trade plants and gardening tips and to socialize.   Birds love to visit the garden, too.  Miracles do happen. Deserts really can bloom.

As I dropped the peas into the soil this afternoon and was transported back to my mother’s garden,  I looked up at my own beautiful garden with is tall spires of garlic, its deep blue irises, its bright yellow-green lettuce, and fragrant herbs. I realized that, while I paint for a living, I now live in a painting.  My surroundings are also my canvas.  Gardening is just another form of landscape painting.   No wonder I am totally absorbed by it.

Messing Around With Paint

The paints are squeezed out in enticing blobs of jumpy colour around the perimeter of my palette. The palette knives are scraped shiny clean and lined up bravely for service, as are the brushes: the rounds, the filberts, the brights, the flats.  I’m in my paint-splattered studio frock, poised  to fling the colour onto the canvas and chase it around in an exciting, mad, artistic scramble, when, all of a sudden, I remember I am a painter.  The realization ruins everything. 

There’s a lot of responsibility that comes with an artistic profession.  Painters are supposed to be visionaries, who reflect the thought of their generation.  Painters tell us who we are and where we are coming from.  A painter carries some great message or some ultimate word in her work that only she can say convincingly and authentically and in an original way.   Will not the canvasses resting on our easels today ultimately be enshrined in museums for posterity to ooh and ah over?

The weight of these thoughts crush me.  I am not a visionary.  I am a bucket-sloshing, weed-pulling, chicken-chasing, wood-stacking woman with a big family and a self-employed husband who works too hard.  My visions are of bed, maybe a night off from doing dishes, or from practicing violin with the kids.  Yet, I am a painter.

I live far in the woods with no electronics except a telephone and a $10 radio/CD player from Sally Ann.   I use the computer once a week at the Portico Timber Frames office, six kilometers away, that is, if the shop guys are not using it.   I hate loud noise, flashing pictures and speed.  I find movies too violent and the changing pictures make me dizzy.  I watch the sunset instead, and the way it gilds all the treetops on the western shore.  Would you really want to choose me to reflect the thought of my generation?  Yet, I am a painter.

The great  word or message that I have to give the world probably would be simply and practically, “Remember your manners and no more than two cookies.”  I can’t help it. It comes from decades of parenting.  Can you imagine if every one of my paintings had that practical message encrypted on them?  Why, I’d be worse off than Van Gogh who only sold one painting in his lifetime, and that was to his own brother, Theo.  I’d never make that first sale and certainly not to my brother who is an avant-guard sculptor. 

Yet, I am a painter even without all the lofty visions, and contemporary knowledge and insight.    I’ll never sit beside Emily Carr and Gagnon in Ken Thompson’s collection of Canadian art.  Does that really matter?  It used to, but at 52, I’m just grateful for the time that I get to stand in silence in front of my canvas and mix the cobalt, the green gold and the alizarin crimson.  I am still amazed and grateful when the shapes just slide effortlessly into place to create a poignant landscape.   Forget for now all the moral responsibilities and obligations to represent my generation for the sake of posterity. Today, I am just a middle-aged woman who loves to mess around with paint, without any strings attached.  

Please, if you find me in front of a canvas, don’t remind me that I am a painter.           

 

 

Perilous Paralysis

I don’t know if I would call today a good day or not.  It was one of those days when all I can think about is a cup of coffee and a little nap under my feather duvet.  

Now, I’m supposed to be an artist.  You know, an original thinker, a fount of imagination and of all things unusual   But not today.  The creativity switch just won’t turn on.  Instead, I go to click the on button of my $15.00 Sally Ann stereo with a spastic volume dial that can unexpectedly jump up to full volume (over 50) if jiggled. 

It happened once to poor Harry.  At the time, I was in the bathroom at the opposite end of the building, a whole timber frame shop away.  Suddenly, above the scream of the planers and tablesaws,  I heard CBC radio host, Julie Nazralla, belt out, in her usual enthusiastic and gushy way, “Welcome to your symphonic hour of power.”  

I raced through the shop, back to my studio, where the other members of my book club stood, frozen in the overwhelming volume, and Harry was frantically spinning the useless volume dial while Beethoven’s symphony ripped.  Julie wasn’t kidding when t\she said this was our hour of power.   

 I chuckle at the memory, then decide that I will have silence today.  I pull up a chair to the window and look to Tower Hill for help. “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help“,  I chant encouragingly.   Today, no help cometh.  

Coffee time.  Better take some to the guys in the shop, too.  Back in my chair, coffee mug in hand,  I watch sharp little spears of snow punish the garden that I just planted on Saturday and involuntarily pull the portable heater closer to me. 

About an hour into this non-creative crisis,  I am definitely feeling the need of a nap.  But the bed is a long, snowy, bike ride away..  So, I sit, practicing my yoga breath, and meditating.   And that, cyber friends, is how I spent my whole morning in the studio.  It sure doesn’t feel like I accomplished anything today. 

I did, however, notice how exquisite, how nourishing, the silence was. 

 

 

  

My CIGARette Boat : poetic musings on a faithful old canoe

On the last day of March, my oldest son and I launched the canoe – an old, patched up discard that my husband and I bought from a canoe rental in Guelph, 30 years ago.   The $400.00 we paid for it seemed like an astronomical amount, especially since what we got was a sun-bleached canoe with cigarette burns all over it.

Rich cottagers on the Muskoka Lakes may have their antique cigar boats, but I have my rickety cigarette canoe and, believe me, it’s no less precious. So far, we’ve enjoyed 30 splendid years of canoeing in that faithful  vessel and she’s still plying these northern waters, still tracking straight and true, despite the extra bit of duct tape patchwork.   Never once has she dumped us, even with all those restless toddlers who would suddenly lurch over her gunnels to drag their curious, little fingers in the water.

As we slide the decrepit canoe  into the newly thawed lake, and gingerly lower ourselves onto the flimsy, wicker seats, we are extra careful not to put any weight on the paper thin floor. We don’t want to go through.  There are still chunks of ice floating around in the lake.  Did she survive another winter, we wonder?  Any sign of a leak spouting out from under the duct tape?   We watch anxiously for a few seconds, but, she holds together and soon we are swinging the bow around the end of the dock and heading exuberantly past the ice and out into the open water.

How can I describe to you the thrill of those very first moments of canoeing each spring?  To grip the smooth, wooden end of the paddle in your cupped hand once again; to feel both the weight of the water against the paddle and the familiar strain in your muscles; to hear the water gurgle as the moving paddle forms little eddies and ruffles around the paddle and canoe; to glide and bob gracefully and freely, like an equestrian under full gallop, over the surface of the water; all that makes me almost burst with joy.  In those first few minutes, I want to canoe until the next freeze up.  (Just  toss my easel in, too.)

I think of all the pristine lakes and serpentine rivers of Muskoka, Haliburton  and Algonquin Park, over which our canoe has safely carried the family, to secluded places of astounding beauty, and of ear-pulsing silence.  Those are the magical  hideaways where the sky pierces through the dense, golden green foliage in little blobs of bright blue;  where undisturbed, fallen leaves paint the forest floor gold, red and rust, and the soaring purple-blue  rocks wear wigs and vests of lime-green moss. .

Is it any wonder that I ended up being a painter?  I am so grateful to my humble, cigarette canoe that has taken me to see the remote, secret colours of our grand, Canadian wilderness.  How can I not paint them?