Paris

Dear blog friends,

I went to Paris last week.  

The weather was really quite mild for middle of February.  I love the avenues of bare winter trees in front of the elegant buildings.  Above is the Hotel des Invalides.

Our daughter Grace came with me.  

We figured Paris out together. 

Even in February, people sit outside to have coffee.  In the above photo, we are at the cafe attached to the famous English bookstore,  Shakespeare and Company.  We could see Notre Dame.

My friend Marjan came from The Netherlands for a day.  We have been friends for over 50 years.

The reason I went to Paris was to view the estrelas of Olga de Amaral (above).  I will soon write about Olga de Amaral's large retrospective at the Cartier foundation in Paris in Modernist Aesthetic.  

On the last day, I walked from our hotel to the Jardin du Luxembourg.  

I found a bench there and watched people walk past, children play football, elders play petanque or chess, and several sets of friends share picnics.

I had my stitching with me.  Stitching always helps me to feel at home no matter where I am, and as a bonus, it holds the time and the memories.  I will always think of Paris when I touch and see this piece.

Wish you were here.

love, Judy

Joyce Wieland: Pucker Up

There is a special exhibition at the national gallery of Canada this month about Joyce Wieland’s lipstick prints.  

Joyce Wieland (1930 - 1998) lived in New York between 1962 and 1971.  Living in the States heightened her awareness of her own Canadian identity and she became inspired her to create artwork about her love for Canada.  She said that she thought of Canada as female.  

Wieland made a series of lipstick (lip-synch) prints between 1970 and 1974  

One of her most famous is her lipstick print of Canada’s national anthem, Oh Canada.  

O Canada by Joyce Wieland, lipstick lithography on paper 1970

Wieland made the print in 1970 at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax in the new lithography workshop.  She substituted lipstick for the oil-based ink and mouthed the words to the national anthem of Canada directly onto the printing stone.  

Photos of the 40 year old artist making the O Canada print are part of the current exhibition.  

Also on display in glass cases are her working drawings.  

Joyce Wieland then created an embroidery of red lips and white teeth singing O Canada.  I wrote about it in 2008 on modernist aesthetic.  here 

She continued this series with an animated film of her embroidered lips and our national anthem.  

Image of Joyce Wieland with her embroidered O Canada
lip-synch animation (York university digital library) 

Read more about Joyce and this original work at the  Art Canada Institute.

Also on display this month at the National Gallery of Canada is the lithograph The Arctic Belongs To Itself  made in 1973. 

It is activist art, made to create awareness in the viewer of resource exploitation and indigenous rights.  Joyce Wieland used a wide variety of media including quilts and film, before the time when such a multi disciplinary practice was common.  

The Arctic Belongs to Itself
lithograph, silkscreen and etching on wove paper by Joyce Wieland, 1973 

Wieland was also ahead of her time in recognizing indigenous sovereignty.  

Fifty years after these prints were made, the president of the large and powerful country next door to Canada, the United States, is casually saying  that Canada should be the 51st state.  Our country’s most important art institution has put together this feminist’s work about national pride at this time in history and I am proud and pleased to share it here. 

To quote Joyce Wieland, “I LOVE CANADA 🇨🇦 ❤️”

Remembrance

Floating World by Linda Finn   acrylic on canvas 24 x 30 inches

This post is dedicated to the memory of Northern Ontario artist, Linda Finn.   (1945 - 2025)    obituary here

It's also about some other late artists from northern Ontario Canada, a place I have lived for over 30 years.   I feel that each of them worked very hard to support art and artists in our beautiful, spread-out community.  I’m writing this post to  sing out their names with respect.  

Linda Finn's paintings, prints and assemblages were a constant at the Perivale gallery  here on Manitoulin. I sought out her innovative work whenever I visited the gallery.  

The War Letters Project in the Art Gallery of Sudbury  
'April 1917' is on the back wall.  Screen print on bible pages, acrylic on paper , photo etching and lithographs on paper, assembled in 2007 by Linda Finn

In 2017, Linda Finn had a solo show at the  Art Gallery of Sudbury and displayed The War Letters Project. an ongoing body of work that she had begun in 2007.  The project included a wide variety of art pieces; assemblages, paintings, prints and book-works and toured to eleven Ontario galleries over a period of years.  

detail of Linda Finn's assemblage of bible pages printed with repeated images of a soldier 

Each piece in the project started from letters that Linda's grandmother Essie received from soldiers over the two world wars.  The artworks are all shown with better photos on Linda's website (here).  While there, you might be interested in the 20 minute video (The Old Tin Box) that tells the story of this project.  

Essie's letter, monoprint with chine colle on paper, 2008 (detail) by Linda Finn

Now, I want to take a moment to mention three other artists who I personally mourn.  Each of them reached out to me and made me feel part of the art community of northern Ontario when our family moved to Manitoulin from Kenora in 1993.  I looked to them as mentors, although they were only a few years older than me.  They developed their careers before the internet which means that online images of their work are rare.  I’ve provided each artist with two links however, and more information and some images can be found if you click. 

 I apologize if this post seems too personal or dark.  Death is not talked about much.  But you know, I feel that I’m not actually saying enough about these friends of mine when I consider all that they have done for Canadian art.  I’m just naming them.  

Ann Suzuki   (died 2021)   her obituary here

ear hear earth heart by Ann Beam, acrylic on paper, 24 x 30 inches

Ann Beam     (died 2024)   her website here     

Ray Laporte   (died 2022)   his obituary here

My friends.  Remembered here.   I miss them and continue to be inspired by each of them.  

Now, in the spirit of memory and joy,  may I show you the prayer cloth that I finished last night?  

Perhaps it is more of a play cloth.  The transferred painting was done by my middle daughter, Grace, when she was five years old.  She painted the mermaid and the merman on paper which I then transferred with a hot iron to polyester fabric. I was teaching this kind of art in the schools at the time and we used the technique at home for birthday party t-shirt-making and the like.  The heart at the bottom was painted just once, then ironed three times onto the cloth, each time getting a little fainter.  I will be seeing Grace this weekend and will give her the quilt.  I think that the twins can use it for their dolls.  

Mermaid Quilt by Judy Martin,
heat transfer on polyester, dyed velvet, hand stitched, 28 x 33.5 inches  2025,
original painting by Grace Martin when she was five years old

another prayer cloth

I made a small quilt this month.  I'm calling it dream cloth.  

The name comes from Paul Klee's quote about imagination that is pinned on my studio wall.       

                "I dream and my soul awakens. Imagination is the star."       Paul Klee

The red Japanese Azumino cotton and the pink linen have been in my stash for a couple of years.  Putting them together in this piece was an impulsive decision.  I didn't think about it.  I reacted to the two colours together with my heart.         

Hand pieced and then hand quilted. 

I used big thread (pearl cotton) to quilt the star and regular hand quilting thread (black) from YIL to quilt the welsh circles and leaves in the surround.   

I've been wanting to try this type of quilting for a long time.    

You can see the design more clearly from the back of the quilt.  (silk fabric) (wool batt)   

I was glad to have it in the car when we went to Toronto to visit family in the middle of the month.  

The piece above is by Canadian artist, Anna Wagner Ott.  

It's the same colour as my dream cloth yet with an open heart shape. She called it Loving Red. 

I've admired Anna's work for a long time and am so glad to have been able to see one of her piece in real life at the World of Threads festival last fall.   

Anna Wagner Ott died in her sleep on Christmas night.  It was a sudden, unexpected death that shocked the textile community.  I feel as if I knew her, and although we did not meet, I am so sad that we are no longer able to be inspired by her constant making.  In 2022, Anna was interviewed by  fibre arts take two .  A tender obituary written by her daughters is on instagram, view it here.   

I like January because it seems empty after the bustle of the fall and then the holidays. This January seemed especially empty for me though and I was glad to have a solid, small quilt to complete. 

bundle of old sweaters

Veiled by Anna Wagner-Ott

Poem

Day and night come hand in hand like a boy and a girl pausing only to eat wild berries out of a dish painted with pictures of birds.

They climb the high ice-covered mountain, then they fly away.  

But you and I don't do such things.

We climb the same mountain; 

I say a prayer for the wind to lift us but it does no good; you hide your head so as not to see the end..

Downard and downward and downward and downward is where the wind is taking us.

I try to comfort you but words are not the answer; I sing to you as mother sang to me.

Your eyes are closed. 

We pass the boy and girl we saw at the beginning; now they are standing on a wooden bridge;

I can see their house behind them;

How fast you go they call to us, but no, the wind is in our ears, that is what we hear....

And then we are simply falling....

And the world goes by, all the worlds, each more beautiful than the last;

I touch your cheek to protect you.

Poem by Louise Gluck

The whirl of 2024

January 14  1:50 pm

February 16  7:16 am

March 14   7:22 am

April 9   8:09 am

May 15  6:54 pm

June 12  8:25 am 

July 14  8:48 am

August 16  6:23 am 

September 23  9:34 am

October 7  6:48 pm

November 10  7:12am

December 21 4:34 pm

I thought about using this space to show the interior of my house with all the finished and unfinished quilts piled up or unfolded across beds and chairs and on the floor and on the wall, because then you might understand how much work I do and how I am always busy ....but...

this constant view of the Wikwemikong peninsula across the water of Manitowaning Bay is truer.  

I stare out the window half the time it seems.   That colour full sky gives me an answer, even when I didn't really ask a question.  Here it is.  

Here is the answer.  Our lives are fragile and our timelines are speeding forward.  We must be kind to each other and kind to ourselves.

It often does seem like there is an urgency to get things done, made, out there, but really, there is no rush.  Don't rush. Go slow.   I wish for you, my dear and appreciated blog readers, the very best for the new year.  Be tender.  Be slower.  Allow softness and kindness to rule.  Let's care.