From the artist:
To my mind, there is not a lot of difference between growing a living thing and painting it, in terms of overall conscious plan, time, and the time after. Both undertakings always override the plan because creativity, nature, and accident exist, and they both demand time without limits if the project is from the heart. After a living thing is grown and after a living thing is painted, there is always the need to do it again just a little differently, or a lot differently, but always to do it again. For me, seeing growth makes life meaningful.
I was born in 1948 in Boston and began to draw living things at a young age. We moved to Ohio where my mother took me to art museums, and sat me down with paper and pencils in the middle of vast white rooms with paintings on the walls while she went from painting to painting. We moved to California in 1955 where I played in the sculpture and painting studios of Kenneth and Jackie Washburn in San Carlos, while my mother assisted Kenneth in carving church doors and other commissions. Jackie gave me casein paints, brushes and scrap panels and let me sit at the back of the adult classes. Listening to mysterious talk about negative spaces, light sources, eye levels, and the Old Masters, I painted lambs.
My mother was a student at the Maryland Art Institute in Baltimore when she met my father during WW II, a junior officer of the battleship Missouri, electronics engineer and pilot. When I was nine, he agreed that I could keep a few animals as long as they paid for themselves. He co-signed a bank loan for my first sheep and taught me to silk screen so that I could make and sell Christmas cards when I thought I might run out of feed money. He built a studio for my mother and kilns to fire sculptures, and he let me buy what I needed at the art stores. While I was still a teen he coaxed me to solo a sailplane to 22,000 feet, among other flying challenges. That rush of excitement, of detachment from the earth, of physical risk, jeopardy, and the search for lift and a good landing have absolutely affected how I live and make art.
I drew animals as a child because I wanted real animals. My parents were not farmers. Once I stabilized the economics of my sheep husbandry to my father’s satisfaction, I added market steers and poultry and exhibited in junior and open divisions around California. Even so, I continued to draw the animals incessantly. Art took as much of my time as livestock, but art seemed to me an impossible potential livelihood. I wondered how an artist’s work could be honestly evaluated. In livestock, my animals were judged and then butchered and judged again to see if the judge was indeed good at picking out the biggest loin-eye. The only artists I knew who were making a living were the technical artists who worked for my father and who let me try out all the new layout gizmos at their drafting tables. I couldn’t see how to work animals into that. My veterinarian loaned me a book of medical drawings by the renowned Dr. Frank Netter and encouraged me to contact him. After exchanging several letters with Dr. Netter, I confidently began to study for that work.
University included travel. Most of my education was in subjects like anatomy and physiology rather than art, so I saw Paulus Potter’s Young Bull in Holland and Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel paintings with no warning that they could change my life. A few weeks later, I met artists at Ein Hod in Israel who made sense of the change I felt. One was the sculptor, painter and printmaker Ben Zwei, who told me that art is most beautiful and satisfying when it is not the intentional copying or restructuring or even understanding of what I see, but an honest and free expression of the inner effect of what I see. A Rumanian sculptor named Tuvia told me how I might have to live to be able to make art that satisfied me.
I married and became a Canadian landed immigrant in 1970 after meeting a New Brunswicker in the West Indies who had been painting there for many years. He had lost a body of work to an unscrupulous dealer and was no longer painting when we met. We settled in his home province. I had not seen anything quite like the green and rugged beauty of New Brunswick when I’d traveled around the world, but it was the rural community culture of the province that started me painting with focus. The people I met had an appreciation of history and pride of heritage that gave me a sense of time and place I’d never experienced anywhere before. Feeling well grounded, I traded my labour and some ink drawings for a milk cow, who in turn gave me a time discipline that immediately enhanced my artwork. Borrowing old farm photos from neighbors, I began painting threshing crews and horse teams pulling grain binders. The paintings were big and came fast from then on.
Athol Roberts, for many years Prince Edward Island’s most senior and celebrated livestock breeder, was in his eighties in 1974 when I got a loan, drove to the Island, and bought that year’s ewe lamb crop from him. A few months after buying the sheep, my husband and I moved, with the livestock, to the Island to caretake a farm, but, both unhappy for different reasons, we parted. An agricultural paradise still today, at that time Prince Edward Island produced some of Canada’s finest purebred livestock. I began helping Athol Roberts and exhibited sheep for him until he was almost ninety years old, at the same time painting and managing my own sheep and other livestock. Having borrowed a Uffizzi book for long winter nights, I found myself adapting aspects of Renaissance paintings into heartfelt portraits of my animals and images of local farming. The Confederation Centre for the Arts included my work in several group shows, and since I was struggling financially, suggested application for a Canada Council materials grant. I received a $1,400 grant for paint, stretchers, framing and crates, had my first major solo exhibition, and then celebrated the receipt of my Canadian citizenship shortly after. When the province commissioned a painting for a gift for the Governor General, I painted my neighbor Chester with his draft horses. The growing attention was exciting but made me realize that without help, I would soon just be making pictures instead of painting.
During spring thaw of 1979, gallery owner Mira Godard flew from Toronto, hopped into my muddy pick-up truck, and drove with me up my long, steep, slippery, red clay road, deeply rutted by log trucks and a school bus. The ride was wild, but Mira liked the animals and the paintings and invited me to join her gallery. This gave me welcome distance from the trade and commerce of art, and gave back my focus on the animals and rural life that made me want to paint so much. In 1981, Mira introduced me to May Cutler of Tundra Books, who published my children’s book Chester’s Barn, a project that gave me the opportunity to travel to the Yukon and other places in Canada. Both women taught me much about maintaining creativity no matter what. Mira taught me not to judge my work but to just do it. The most insightful hour of my life professionally was during my first visit to the gallery when Mira narrated a slide show for me of my own work.
In 1984, I met the Cape Breton writer who is now my husband. We compromised between our respective islands and since 1988 have lived in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia on an apple farm. I continue to keep and paint livestock and study books on Renaissance painting. Always unconsciously seeking physical activity to balance the stillness of painting, and being interested in Nova Scotia’s local history and traditions, I have been teaming oxen, my husband as coach and chain-tender. I began watching ox pulls many years ago when I saw that today’s exhibition oxen are as happy to be part of events as most dogs are to go for a car ride. Few animals receive as much training, hands- on attention, and care as modern-day oxen, with the exceptions perhaps of service dogs or a girl’s first horse. Cattle like to show their handler what they know and what they can do and are very pleasing to work with. Years of making stretchers, crates and frames for my paintings have given me enough skills to build my own ox yokes. I suspect that the ox yoke was the airfoil of prehistory, that its engineering and curves had as much impact on its time as the airfoil has had on ours. I find working in front of an excited two-ton team to be as heart thumping, breath taking and mind honing as looking for lift at 22,000 feet.
For me, painting is often like looking for lift at 22,000 feet. Painting is trying to still an ox team’s power and contain it in two dimensions within a slight frame. Painting for me is also going back in time working from Renaissance paintings, spending many hours looking at tiny details. Reading Cellini and Vasari has added voices of those times to those paintings. I look for the places where the Renaissance artist might have slowed down to decide about a merger or sped up with the fun of a certain colour or light. These artists and their works have given me the skills to paint, life has given me the energy, and my animals have provided the wonder that I explore.
To my mind, there is not a lot of difference between growing a living thing and painting it, in terms of overall conscious plan, time, and the time after. Both undertakings always override the plan because creativity, nature, and accident exist, and they both demand time without limits if the project is from the heart. After a living thing is grown and after a living thing is painted, there is always the need to do it again just a little differently, or a lot differently, but always to do it again. For me, seeing growth makes life meaningful.
I was born in 1948 in Boston and began to draw living things at a young age. We moved to Ohio where my mother took me to art museums, and sat me down with paper and pencils in the middle of vast white rooms with paintings on the walls while she went from painting to painting. We moved to California in 1955 where I played in the sculpture and painting studios of Kenneth and Jackie Washburn in San Carlos, while my mother assisted Kenneth in carving church doors and other commissions. Jackie gave me casein paints, brushes and scrap panels and let me sit at the back of the adult classes. Listening to mysterious talk about negative spaces, light sources, eye levels, and the Old Masters, I painted lambs.
My mother was a student at the Maryland Art Institute in Baltimore when she met my father during WW II, a junior officer of the battleship Missouri, electronics engineer and pilot. When I was nine, he agreed that I could keep a few animals as long as they paid for themselves. He co-signed a bank loan for my first sheep and taught me to silk screen so that I could make and sell Christmas cards when I thought I might run out of feed money. He built a studio for my mother and kilns to fire sculptures, and he let me buy what I needed at the art stores. While I was still a teen he coaxed me to solo a sailplane to 22,000 feet, among other flying challenges. That rush of excitement, of detachment from the earth, of physical risk, jeopardy, and the search for lift and a good landing have absolutely affected how I live and make art.
I drew animals as a child because I wanted real animals. My parents were not farmers. Once I stabilized the economics of my sheep husbandry to my father’s satisfaction, I added market steers and poultry and exhibited in junior and open divisions around California. Even so, I continued to draw the animals incessantly. Art took as much of my time as livestock, but art seemed to me an impossible potential livelihood. I wondered how an artist’s work could be honestly evaluated. In livestock, my animals were judged and then butchered and judged again to see if the judge was indeed good at picking out the biggest loin-eye. The only artists I knew who were making a living were the technical artists who worked for my father and who let me try out all the new layout gizmos at their drafting tables. I couldn’t see how to work animals into that. My veterinarian loaned me a book of medical drawings by the renowned Dr. Frank Netter and encouraged me to contact him. After exchanging several letters with Dr. Netter, I confidently began to study for that work.
University included travel. Most of my education was in subjects like anatomy and physiology rather than art, so I saw Paulus Potter’s Young Bull in Holland and Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel paintings with no warning that they could change my life. A few weeks later, I met artists at Ein Hod in Israel who made sense of the change I felt. One was the sculptor, painter and printmaker Ben Zwei, who told me that art is most beautiful and satisfying when it is not the intentional copying or restructuring or even understanding of what I see, but an honest and free expression of the inner effect of what I see. A Rumanian sculptor named Tuvia told me how I might have to live to be able to make art that satisfied me.
I married and became a Canadian landed immigrant in 1970 after meeting a New Brunswicker in the West Indies who had been painting there for many years. He had lost a body of work to an unscrupulous dealer and was no longer painting when we met. We settled in his home province. I had not seen anything quite like the green and rugged beauty of New Brunswick when I’d traveled around the world, but it was the rural community culture of the province that started me painting with focus. The people I met had an appreciation of history and pride of heritage that gave me a sense of time and place I’d never experienced anywhere before. Feeling well grounded, I traded my labour and some ink drawings for a milk cow, who in turn gave me a time discipline that immediately enhanced my artwork. Borrowing old farm photos from neighbors, I began painting threshing crews and horse teams pulling grain binders. The paintings were big and came fast from then on.
Athol Roberts, for many years Prince Edward Island’s most senior and celebrated livestock breeder, was in his eighties in 1974 when I got a loan, drove to the Island, and bought that year’s ewe lamb crop from him. A few months after buying the sheep, my husband and I moved, with the livestock, to the Island to caretake a farm, but, both unhappy for different reasons, we parted. An agricultural paradise still today, at that time Prince Edward Island produced some of Canada’s finest purebred livestock. I began helping Athol Roberts and exhibited sheep for him until he was almost ninety years old, at the same time painting and managing my own sheep and other livestock. Having borrowed a Uffizzi book for long winter nights, I found myself adapting aspects of Renaissance paintings into heartfelt portraits of my animals and images of local farming. The Confederation Centre for the Arts included my work in several group shows, and since I was struggling financially, suggested application for a Canada Council materials grant. I received a $1,400 grant for paint, stretchers, framing and crates, had my first major solo exhibition, and then celebrated the receipt of my Canadian citizenship shortly after. When the province commissioned a painting for a gift for the Governor General, I painted my neighbor Chester with his draft horses. The growing attention was exciting but made me realize that without help, I would soon just be making pictures instead of painting.
During spring thaw of 1979, gallery owner Mira Godard flew from Toronto, hopped into my muddy pick-up truck, and drove with me up my long, steep, slippery, red clay road, deeply rutted by log trucks and a school bus. The ride was wild, but Mira liked the animals and the paintings and invited me to join her gallery. This gave me welcome distance from the trade and commerce of art, and gave back my focus on the animals and rural life that made me want to paint so much. In 1981, Mira introduced me to May Cutler of Tundra Books, who published my children’s book Chester’s Barn, a project that gave me the opportunity to travel to the Yukon and other places in Canada. Both women taught me much about maintaining creativity no matter what. Mira taught me not to judge my work but to just do it. The most insightful hour of my life professionally was during my first visit to the gallery when Mira narrated a slide show for me of my own work.
In 1984, I met the Cape Breton writer who is now my husband. We compromised between our respective islands and since 1988 have lived in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia on an apple farm. I continue to keep and paint livestock and study books on Renaissance painting. Always unconsciously seeking physical activity to balance the stillness of painting, and being interested in Nova Scotia’s local history and traditions, I have been teaming oxen, my husband as coach and chain-tender. I began watching ox pulls many years ago when I saw that today’s exhibition oxen are as happy to be part of events as most dogs are to go for a car ride. Few animals receive as much training, hands- on attention, and care as modern-day oxen, with the exceptions perhaps of service dogs or a girl’s first horse. Cattle like to show their handler what they know and what they can do and are very pleasing to work with. Years of making stretchers, crates and frames for my paintings have given me enough skills to build my own ox yokes. I suspect that the ox yoke was the airfoil of prehistory, that its engineering and curves had as much impact on its time as the airfoil has had on ours. I find working in front of an excited two-ton team to be as heart thumping, breath taking and mind honing as looking for lift at 22,000 feet.
For me, painting is often like looking for lift at 22,000 feet. Painting is trying to still an ox team’s power and contain it in two dimensions within a slight frame. Painting for me is also going back in time working from Renaissance paintings, spending many hours looking at tiny details. Reading Cellini and Vasari has added voices of those times to those paintings. I look for the places where the Renaissance artist might have slowed down to decide about a merger or sped up with the fun of a certain colour or light. These artists and their works have given me the skills to paint, life has given me the energy, and my animals have provided the wonder that I explore.