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!

Yellow Crane Tower, Wuhan, China 

Home Again!

It is wonderful to be back in clean, quiet Canada!  I am overwhelmed with the enormity of what I have experienced in the last seven weeks.  I understand now why people travel through Asia.  It can stand a westerner on her ear and turn her head around 360 degrees, if she is willing.  I am dreaming like a madwoman, awakening in the night wondering what country I'm in right now.  I suppose what is happening is that my beleaguered brain is beginning to sort out all the images, sounds, smells and feelings.

In Guangzhou, I purchased a set of Chinese calligraphy brushes that come to a fine point, and in Wuhan, a chop with my name in Mandarin.  I don't know if I will actually use the chop, but it gives me confidence and reminds me of where I've been.  I know I will use the brushes.  They make the most elegant strokes, expressing grace and clarity.

 I feel so strangely changed.   What will my writing, drawing and sculpture look like from now on?  It could never be the same as before because I am not the same.

China

It's been said that to truly know your own country, you must leave it for a while to get perspective.  We are heading for China, Vietnam and Cambodia in two weeks and will have an opportunity to test this saying.  I'm exhilarated, thrilled and just a wee bit terrified!  I have only been in a "big" city once (Chicago) and that was for four days.  I spent nearly all my waking hours in art galleries and just can't say that I became familiar with the American culture.  For nearly six weeks, we will be in several genuinely big cities.  We will be absorbing sounds, smells, sights and customs that are completely new to us, and yet old as Methuselah to the citizens of those countries.
So, during this trip I'm hoping to make time each day to record, through sketching and journaling, some of the effects all that stimulation will have on this old soul.   Our budget is small, and we will be traveling with friends who speak the language and know the culture and customs AND have the wherewithal to keep us out of the tourist traps set for the foreign devils!  I'm reciting to myself some basic rules of etiquette as laid out in various books aimed at people like us - don't point your chopsticks and don't stab food with them, don't pat children on the head  (it's a sacred part of their bodies), don't point the soles of your feet at anyone (rough on me because I'm short and always wiggling around in a chair, looking for a comfortable way to sit), don't make constant eye contact (also rough on me, having spent 16 years learning to make eye contact because we live in a small town now) and a few others which I'm sure I will be forgiven for if I commit.

Getting back down to It...

The very things that make us human and, therefore give us something to actually say or otherwise express, are often the things that prevent us from getting down to it.   I'm trying to roll with this epiphany.  The last month and a half have been full of living, and as I realize the richness of my life, I'm teaching myself to relax into it rather than agonize and agitate.

Last night on iPhoto I played a few pictures of my drawings and sculpture from over the years and up to the present, with some Djivan Gasparian as background music.  It put an entirely different slant on things for me.  What I realized is that I have some good work but not nearly enough to "fill out" a theme or an idea.  (My good friend, Sue, has pointed this out to me already, so this was merely a confirmation of what I know to be true.)  Still, two smacks upside the head are better than one, so with this on my mind, I'm once again pulling things back in, focussing and working towards digging deeper and deeper.

These daily sketches are in no particular order - just a random choice. The silver bridge is a lovely sweeping arch, one of three bridges in our little town.

This is the model I have made for the fetal mold, which will be cast in handmade paper.  I will use latex mold compound.

HAIKU
My child is woman,
Mother to her baby-child
My mother, child-like.

Although the sketching challenge is unrelated in subject matter to the main body of images and sculptures that I am working on, the exercise is helpful anyway.  These are very quick, most being finished in less than 15 minutes.  They are purposely limited to the view out our second floor apartment window which is of the main street in our town.  Everyone, sooner or later, passes under this window.

November 7, 2009
Earlier this year (2009), I participated in a remarkable, week long workshop attended by seven other women and mentored by Dorothy Field, a poet and writer, paper maker, sculptor and world traveller.   We were each searching for a new direction, or a strengthening of the direction we had already found ourselves heading.  From this time at Metchosin Summer School of the Arts, which was spent at Pearson College of the Pacific, I found a part of me that I thought I had lost.
During the workshop, I was greatly encouraged to explore a motif that has been part of my life for many years.  The elements of dreams, of sleep, of birth and death all seemed to be tied together for me and have, within the last ten years or so manifested themselves in a tiny, fetal form.  I began playing with a large Hake brush and gorgeous indigo watercolour paint.  The strokes evoked the motif and so I began to pursue it with great enthusiasm.  This idea is evolving into sculptural forms and will, eventually become an installation.
In order to keep a certain lightness and flow, I have also begun to answer a challenge put to me by my good friend, Sue.  The challenge is, a sketch a day for a month, no matter what.  I am presently at day 20 and have struggled through boredom, lack of motivation - every nasty little trick of those voices in my head.  But I still persevere!
This blog will be my method of documenting the process.  I hope to be honest, even when it hurts!  But, it will also motivate me to know I have made a commitment to others, and will not be so easily broken.
And so, it begins...