studio - behind the scenes

My assemblage, Prairie 1 – Unsettled, is in good company at the CAG Juried Show until the end of October. The chosen works all inspire curiosity (how did they do that?) and creativity (how would I express this?) As the leaves drift down from the maple tree outside my window I marvel at how others have captured such exquisite moments in nature.

The Colborne Art Gallery itself is in the old county land registry, thus the bars on the windows. What was more valuable back then than title to land swindled away from First Nations! It is a land acknowledgment made manifest. That it is now an art gallery might go some way towards Reconciliaction. Let us be mindful when we cross that threshold.

Today my father would have been 97. Looking back, here he is in about 1970 with Rob at the ranch that he bought east of Brooks Alberta. Looking forward, the book I have written about him and his ranch has found a publisher! I spent the last year and a half writing an intertwined memoir of my French father, of the land he ranched in the drylands of Alberta from 1969 to 1999, and my reflection on our changing relationships with the land, with the peoples who came before us, and with non-human life. While I call my work creative non-fiction, it is a mix of essay, poetry, images, even a bit of fiction. I had long wanted to capture the strange beauty of prairie for those not familiar with it, especially now, at a time of disappearing family ranches and of Reconciliation with First Nations. As a counterpoint I write about my father’s unlikely path from a small town in the Vosges Mountains of Alsace to ranching in Alberta.  The life, the writing, the publishing – equally celebration and journey!

Another look at contemplative photography: world as collage. Is this image anything more than light and shadow, shapes and colours? Is this singular image ever likely to be recaptured as it appears here? Every day the sun will be higher in the sky, the shadows cast on a different part of the wall, the vegetation in another stage of springing forth, next year on the same day at the same time it might rain or snow. This wall has disappeared. And you, this moment, will disappear into the next moment. What you feel now can vapourize into the nowness of whatever walls surround you, those disappearing walls.

Daylight Savings Time! I’m not going to ask the all-knowing what we are saving daylight from. The whole thing is another of humanity’s absurd attempts to control the disinterested natural world. Light was the focus of this week’s contemplative photography study; how light changes that disinterested world and and our perception of it; how we can change our own clouded thinking about what is beautiful. Change was the focus of my writing this week, as I polished a poem to submit to Hill Spirits VI, the Northumberland Festival of the Arts biennial anthology of writing and art. Change is the theme this year, a topic at once so narrow and so broad that it too impels you to change your thinking, to come up with what’s fresh!