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.