With a big sky and with elm trees

My coming-of-age time (13 or so).

I'm the one in the aqua coat and no boots.

I grew up in North Western Ontario, ten miles west of Fort Frances.  It was a flat area, with reasonable land for farming.  My father built our home and continued to build it for my whole childhood, often moving rooms or stairwells while I was at school.  He was born in Finland and immigrated to this area of Ontario with his mother when he was 5 years old.  I am very proud to be 50 percent Finnish.  I feel that the aesthetic of noble poverty and simplicity and love of lakes and nature is part of that culture and is evident in Finnish design.  My mother was born in Fort Frances, and married my father when she was a school teacher in a rural school.  She loved elegance and made her own clothes using Vogue patterns.  She loved literature, especially Virginia Woolf, and she loved learning, teaching herself French from reading mystery novels, and psychology through distance education.  She had allergies and had to take needles for them when I was growing up.  She was very shy and so we never went anywhere or had anyone over to our house.  I felt isolated and wanted to get out of there, move to a city, see art and movies and interesting people.  I wanted to go to university and study literature or art.  On the other hand, my mother’s love for culture meant that there was good literature in the house all the time and lots of magazines and art supplies for us to use.  I took piano lessons and got quite far in the Royal conservatory exams.  You can see the landscape in the background – the horizon and the sky and the elm trees, there is an especially beautiful and large one just out of sight in this photo, at the corner of our driveway and the highway.  There was a long bus ride east towards the high school in town or west when we were younger to the new public school in Devlin.  

I believe that our childhood and youth inform our creative work more than we realize.  Early in my career I read Originals by Eleanor Munro, a book of interviews of American women artists. She always asked them about their childhood landscape and time and again, that landscape would appear in some way in their mature art.

My childhood landscape was one of isolation and emptiness.  

With a big sky and creative parents.  With elm trees and a highway and a sister and a brother.