Three quarters of an hour drive from Eastend is the hamlet of Admiral, population 30.  There are three churches all within a stone's throw of each other.  There is a credit union and a post office as well as a massive red grain elevator off in the near distant valley.
I've been told there are three artists living here, each in their own homes.  One is a photographer and is it any wonder?  The winter light in Saskatchewan is magical.  Nearly everything is pastel and when you do spot something darker, it emphatically punctuates the landscape.  Such a silent place except for the wind when it sculpts amazing drifts and whistles over the rolling hills and through the century-old windbreaks.

In a few days I will have been in Eastend two weeks or half my allotted time.  In those nearly two weeks, I have been to a traveling art show reception (organized by the Eastend Arts Council), a house concert in the Silver Willow Gallery and Guest House, an arts council meeting and last night as a guest at a Mardi Gras pancake supper which must have served a hundred people.   The entertainment at the supper was provided by a trio of seniors who variously played piano, saxophone and accordion.
The yearly Stegner House Dinner, held March 9 this year, has a theme of Ragtime Music and the Depression Years and so as a run-up, the trio played that old music that somehow everyone over the age of sixty miraculously found stored in the mind.  As a result, we all got dreamy and remembered and sang.

I cannot really find words to express the feeling of comfort I have in this energetic little town.  I think I know where it comes from - the attitudes, expressions and gestures of the lifers here are familiar.   I am reminded of grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins.   Even though I never lived in Saskatchewan except for one brief year when I was four, I feel comfortable.

And now here comes the dawning revelation that this is where my roots lie.  Is this the muse bestowing another sparkling insight - or am I getting bushed?  I think I'll go for a walk and talk to the folks at the coffee shop...

The winter light of the prairies is ethereal, pure, intoxicating.  Colours are gentle and features meld into one other with an occasional certain line of shadow to give you ground.   It is hard to imagine where you are in the line of time.  You are suspended somewhere between the heavens and the earth, between ancient history and four o'clock this day in the afternoon.

It must have been days like these that my grandparents remembered while they had returned to Ontario for two years to help my suddenly widowed great-grandmother in Grey County.  I have read of the unimaginable hardships of the dry grasslands homesteader, the soddys leaking for days after a torrential downpour, the isolation, plagues of insects and vicious prairie blizzards.  Yet, they made the decision to come home to this place.   Perhaps it was the amazing light, or the hundreds of thousands of spring crocuses and the summer tiger lilies, the waterfall song of the meadowlark and the brilliant flash of bluebirds.

EASTEND SK

This is, at first blush, an unlikely place for an artist's residency.  It is at the east end of the Cypress Hills which straddle south-eastern Alberta and south-western Saskatchewan.  The surrounding area has a history of hardship, bloodshed, conflict between native populations and settlers from east of this area.  Less than a hundred and fifty years ago it was a land of buffalo, grizzly bears and cougars. Here is where the Northwest Mounted Police were established at Fort Walsh to squelch rum running and to protect the Medicine Line.

Eastend, now a picturesque, pleasant town has been immortalized in Wallace Stegner's book called Wolf Willow.  He peels back the layers of memory of his childhood spent here and reveals the essence of being a westerner and, as he puts it, a sticker.  Of course things have changed since Stegner was a youngster but believe me, the powerful pull of the land is still very much part of the psyche of the citizens.

I confess I am here at the Wallace Stegner House in part to explore the experience of being an artist in residence but more, I am exploring my own history through the lives of my paternal grand-parents who homesteaded in Aylesbury area, just a hundred or so kilometres north east of here.  Grandfather Ferguson left Ontario with a wanderlust that is a genetic trait I own.  He met his match in my adventurous Grandmother who came to the prairies, sight unseen to marry a man she would love for over fifty years, bearing him twelve children.

My task over the next three and a half weeks will be to create a book about these two relatives.  I am starting at the very beginning.  I will bind the book myself and illustrate the pages.  To honor my grandfather and my father who were both creative men, I will also write poetry to accompany the illustrations.

There.  Now I have made my committment and have shared it.

These are some photos of my studio.  I'm forever paring down, scaling back, refocussing - whatever!  It's a struggle that I suspect I share with many creative folks.  Writing right now has got me in its clutches but I will finish my monster painting!