ANIL'S GHOST

Michael Ondaatje. ANIL'S GHOST. Vintage, 2000.

You know how you wake from a dream and you don't remember the details but you remember how you enjoyed being in it? That's what I felt about my first reading of Anil's Ghost. I enjoyed it, but could not remember any details (except it was about a female forensic anthropologist working in Sri Lanka during internal political strife). After re-reading this novel for book club, I still like it. Enjoyed a vicarious trip to Sri Lanka. Enjoyed a female protagonist who has a work and family and love history not dependent on some man. Enjoyed the importance of art and spirituality to the plot. And am reminded again of how lucky we are here in Canada where opposing factions as of yet are not going at each other with grenades, machetes, and guns. 

Mud Woman: Poems from the Clay

June 21, 2017
Nora Naranjo-Morse. Mud Woman: Poems from the Clay. U Arizona, 1992.

A delightful collection of poetry and art, about creativity and identity.

Ireland In Poetry

Ireland In Poetry: With Paintings, Drawings, Photographs, and Other Works of Art. Charles Sullivan, Editor. Abrams, 1990.

An incredibly beautiful collection. 

Embers

Embers. J.M. Bridgeman. Jade Mountain Books, 2016.

My display for the Family History Show & Tell last weekend in Cloverdale. These are some of the objects which inspired me to weave them into an imagined story for my novel EMBERS. Just arrived. Available on Amazon.ca and (next week) at Baker's Books in Hope, BC. EMBERS, set in BC and in Ireland, is likely to appeal to open-minded older women interested in art and travel.  

One Hundred Flowers

Georgia O'Keeffe. One Hundred Flowers. Knopf, 1990.

Embers

Embers

Found a stock photo which appeals to me, the way the dying sun over the water, the marsh grasses evoke the two settings of my work-in-progress - southern British Columbia and Ireland. 

Title de jour: Embers. 

Blurb: When things happen around her, Wyn McBride, a mature woman at a crossroads, is forced to move, to come to terms with the past, and to take a serious look at the present she has chosen for herself. A serendipitous trip to Ireland offers the unexpected opportunity for "deep travel" where she encounters, face to face, parts of herself she never knew existed.

Epigraph: It could be a meeting on the street, or a party or a lecture, or just a simple, banal introduction, then suddenly there is a flash of recognition and the embers of kinship glow. There is an awakening between you, a sense of ancient knowing. - John O'Donohue

The Desert Places

July 11, 2016

Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss. The Desert Places. Illustrated by Matt Kish. Curbside Splendor, 2013.

The Desert Places is a slim volume of art with a stylish re-telling of origin myth, of lurking evil, its evolution, and the underlying destructiveness of "progress".

I can only take refuge in the title, alluding for me to Robert Frost's "Desert Places," which, of course, begins: "You cannot scare me . . . "

Inspired by Emily II - Juxtapositions

On the fourth floor of the Vancouver Art Gallery, In Dialogue with Carr juxtaposes paintings, sketches, and primitive pots by Emily with the work of four local living artists, Evan Lee, Liz Magor, Marianne Nicolson, and Douglas Coupland.


As you enter the gallery, the first painting, of Emily and her sister sitting at tea, echoes the French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings and drawings on the main floor. The warmth and intimacy of this domestic scene remind us that Emily studied in France and could paint well in that style if she chose to do so.


A series of Evan Lee paintings which began life as found photographs of forest fires evoke the beauty in ugliness and destruction of altered landscapes in Emily's paintings of gravel pits and clear cuts.


Douglas Coupland displays two of his 'button blankets'. These are not so much like blanket capes as they are king-sized bed coverings or wall hangings. The first is a white field, reminiscent of Salish woven wool, with multi-coloured manufactured buttons affixed in even rows. The second on a solid black field displays 1000 loonies. There is irony here, humour, as well as an homage to the ritual making and gifting of blankets, articles of both beauty and utility, valuable hand-made objects which required 'a wealth of relatives working in concert' to produce goods for the giveaway at traditional potlatches. Other blankets and crazy quilts (I'm not sure whether they are all Coupland's) are decorated with other iconic images from aboriginal and Canadian culture which have replaced (or infiltrated) the winter dances. One is aerated with dream-catchers, another is a crazy collage of hockey memorabilia, and one showcases shiny hubcaps.


A large display case holds several of Emily's primitive clay pots decorated with First Nations motifs. The writing on the wall acknowledges the loan of pottery items from the private collection of Bryan Adams. Coupland points out that he and Adams grew up two blocks apart from each other on the North Shore but that he has only seen Bryan once in his life, at the Shell station. The connection, he suggests, is that they are both artists influenced by their relationship with the surrounding forest, as was Emily. The difference is, he suggests, that Emily had friends on the reserve and visited there often while, he, Coupland, has lived there a lifetime within blocks of Indian land, and has never set foot on the reserve. How true this is for most Canadians. As much as we may wish to feel connected, often the only link between our personal cultures is through the work of artists. Is this connection lost forever, irretrievable, or is Emily again the pathfinder, showing us where we all must go before we can feel truly at home in this land?

Four Corners

Four Corners

The Back Room Show for August (2008) features four artists in at least as many different media. They have not exactly each claimed a corner, but each artist has definitely staked out her own territory. The beauty of the world, the "richness of our surroundings" inspires each artist.

Lona Munck's gentle watercolour, oil, and acrylic landscapes set a serene mood in the natural world. The delicate touch and calm muted colours are very appealing. The local, upper Fraser Valley, Agassiz/Harrison Lake scenes, including varied landscapes such as alpine, waterfalls, forest, glacier, river, fireweed, help celebrate the local. "My goal is to share with you, my joy in color, line, form, shape, and design." she says on her website www.freewebs.con/lonasviews

Diane MacKenzie's paintings are, for the most part, larger, which helps them capture viewer attention in an eclectic collection. The feature pastoral of contented dairy cows under a shady tree carries on the celebration of the local. A photograph from the 1950's of two "rebels without a cause", complete with cigarettes, undershirts, blue jeans, and old car, almost presents a lesson in creating art from life. The artist has transformed the photograph into a graphite wash sketch and into an enlarged sepia-toned watercolour, both very effective. Other subjects lean more towards farmyard and garden. Her roses are so convincing you feel as if you can smell them.

Anna Johnstad-Moller's photographs offer another way of looking. Two large iconic images, one of a Swedish thatch-roofed house, another of a white-painted church, emphasize how important is choice of subject to a photographer's goals. And an interesting collection of beach shots, from fly fisherman to close-ups of kelp and bubbles of vegetation, reminds us of how the camera both directs us and helps us to see. AJ-M also displays pine needle baskets and woven sage incense, and some beautiful postcards of her photographs.

Finally, Diane Ferguson's raku is breath-taking. Occupying the corner opposite the entrance, it sucks you right in, down on your knees, to look. Too slow, when I went back to photograph the large Chihuly-inspired bowls, they were already gone. One was dark with royal blue interior; the second was the iridescent copper I associate more with raku. Together they forced the viewer into a dilemma--how can one possibly choose one over the other? The large swimming fish sculptures are also very appealing, colourful, humourous, oozing character, personality. My flash only helped heighten the subtlety of colour and texture.

Any one of these artists could shoulder a show of her own. Together, they offer an almost over-whelming potpourri of beautiful creations which inhabit the Back Room at the Hope Arts Gallery in Hope, BC until August 29, 2008.

Canyons of Glass

the purple cow i never saw
wandered concrete canyons of glass
gazed at Landscape Spirits in awe
gave the boulder pool a pass

In rivers the water you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes. So with time present. -- Leonardo da Vinci

Rural Life

Rural Life

As Ian Tyson says of Charlie Russell, "get her all down before she goes . . . you gotta get her all down cause she's bound to go." A similar sense of urgency underlies Linda Bishop's two dozen paintings in the new Back Room Show. The Rural Life--A Collection of Original Oils Depicting Life in the Country focuses on the creatures with which we live--chickens, sheep, cattle, and horses. There are no barns or factory farms for these animals. They live in a green world where you can see the swish of a long graceful tail, hear the bawl of a protesting cow, the scratch of chickens dancing, the jangle of harness. The cattle portraits especially, groups in a pasture or jostling for winter feed, individuals scratching on a favourite tree or resting in the shade, capture "personality", a "knowing" intelligence, curiosity, the uniqueness of individuals, the way in which they watch us as carefully as we watch them. One Bossie stretches into a welcome scratch behind the ears from a trusted friend who is the only human figure in the show. There are also several landscapes--waterlilies on a creek, a slough, a rippled stream in spring edged with red osier, a mauve sunset. And there is one grouping of still lifes, various arrangements of pieces from a gold-trimmed Blue Mikado-pattern tea set--cups and saucers, creamer, sugar tray and tongs, tea pot, a crumpled table cloth, warm sunlight.

What is the link between an antique tea service, an object not necessarily limited to rural settings, and the cattle, horses, sheep, and chickens in Bishop's countryside? Perhaps it is the celebration of a fragile threatened existence. The joy in hard work and simple pleasures. Taking notice and taking care. Enjoying the beauty in nature and man-made objects. Nurturing. Humour. Respect for each other and for the animate world in which we are set. Respect for tradition. For traditions we inherit. Traditions, like the tea set, like the passion for country living. Values which we inherit from earlier generations, which we choose to inform our lives, when we choose to move to the country, to remain rural, in spite of encroaching development, the houses, golf courses, people crowding agricultural land. These paintings portray things we return to again and again as an antidote to the rush and noise of modern life. Things which give meaning to existence, purpose beyond our self-centred anxieties.

Linda Bishop's paintings of rural beauty inspire thoughts and feelings; they will be in the Back Room of the Hope Arts Gallery until the end of July (2008). Catch them before they go.

April--Flora and Fauna

Flora and Fauna

A curvaceous slash of hot pink feathers greets you as you step into the room, the boa in its own way, with colour and natural medium, both separating and uniting the work of two painters, Sharon Blythe and J'nia Fowler, sharing the exhibition space with their Flora and Fauna.

Sharon's bold and exuberant "phat fairies" frolic in a martini glass, lounge in the pink luxury of petals in "Sleepy Afternoon" and "Catching a Few Rays". Her exquisite watercolour flora--lilies, hydrangea, thistle, grapes, as well as the matted paintings of bamboo and exotic birds--are a Canadian fusion, extrapolating upon the single-stroke Chinese brush painting style. Greeting cards of Sharon's work make her art accessible to everyone.

The flora theme repeats in J'nia Fowler's colourful northern landscapes where Van Gogh meets the Group of Seven. In these fifteen new acrylic paintings, she captures stormy skies, snowscapes, light, sunset, but also movement, emotion, mood. Her brush strokes suggest rather than replicate; her trees would make a grapple-hook want to hug instead. As a viewer, you know you want one of these canvases; you just cannot decide which to pick. The rapid development of J'nia's style since her last exhibit has commentators insisting that we will all be saying "I knew her when . . . "

Flora and Fauna inhabits the Backroom of the Hope Arts Gallery, Hope, BC from April 1to April 28, 2008.

March--Recent Works

Recent Works

Delicate and Serene are my 'first impressions' of Lori Motokado's large watercolours on display in the Hope Arts Gallery. An old boat docked in Harrison lures me through the hallway tunnel. In the Backroom, a dozen more familiar scenes. Boats in Nelson and Steveston. A casual display of battered trunks at the Kilby Museum in Harrison Mills suggests travel and a time warp. A toy wagon, a tricycle evoke nostalgia for a childhood of long ago. Another tricycle, stashed in the Kettle Valley Museum in Midway, is a streamlined rocket of the 1930s whose design is so fast and sleek and modern, it was way ahead of cool. The plant portraits—bamboo, an apple branch laden with blossoms, a frilled tulip bud, a blue balloon bursting to pop, all atop the palest suggestion of a wash—are images of transformation, capturing the moment when one thing becomes another.

Artifacts, horticulture, waterfronts are subjects and scenes which could be 'anywhere', yet the artist's graceful captions locate them specifically, while at the same time expanding upon her inspiration—“to make the ordinary extraordinary”. Indeed, as the images capture and hold our attention, we identify with the battered luggage and the abandoned toys which have moved from function to fondly forgotten. We too will cycle through stages, ages, places of storage; we will live in memory, evoke nostalgia. This art helps us feel more fully aware and thus, more fully alive. Everyday objects become iconic; the light and colour, translucent, luminous, numinous. Focusing on the beauty in which we live, these paintings are elegiac in the best sense—a mourning for our lost selves, a celebration of the way we were, a recognition of what is to come, and hope, in the buds of spring.

Lori Motokado lives in Coquitlam, British Columbia. Her recent watercolours hang in the Hope Arts Gallery Back Room from March 1 to 28, 2008.

February--Been There Done That

Been There Done That

Sheila Patzke’s Been There Done That opens the Hope Arts Gallery Backroom Exhibits for 2008. Langley resident Patzke’s vibrant acrylics and watercolours, often simple sketches in bold colours on generous white space, with an emphasis on line and curl, exude energy and enthusiasm. The variety of subject matter--florals, critters, landscapes, seascapes, still life, and people, people, people—are loosely collected around a ‘hurdy-gurdy’ saloon girl theme of follies and fun. With Barbie-long legs and scandalous costumes, the girls of the dance stage and bistro settings evoke both Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas. Patzke has added to the appeal of her show, two dozen paintings ranging from seventy to under five hundred dollars, by offering smaller versions of her works on greeting cards. Attractive portfolio binders provide a retrospective of her career. Her artist’s statement says simply that her creativity is inspired by things she sees. The comments in the guest book confirm that people in the crowd attending the opening were inspired by what they saw. An invocation to spring, a celebration of life lived, of joy, Been There Done That is in the Backroom of the Hope Arts Gallery in Hope, BC, from February 1 to February 28, 2008.