Anong Beam

Spring Bay, Mennonite Barn, oil on canvas, 2020 by Anong Beam

Looking at my life, and with my mother entering Alzheimer's' I have been painting memories.

My practice has always centered around water and how it holds and contains us, and is a silent witness again and again to all events, constantly renewed and present in us, as it was for our ancestors.

Ghost Moose and Camp, oil on canvas, 2019 by Anong Beam

But now I am looking back and I feel like I am reclaiming histories for myself.  

I am inspired by other histories of place like Camp Forestia by Peter Doig.  It is a classic camp from the Ontario north, there are many all around me, and they are completely other.

I have memories of seeing people go to them.  They are the settler camps, even though they are so familiar.

They are a visual image of privilege and isolation.

Camp Cadillac oil on canvas  2018  by Anong Beam

All around my home, even on reserve, the waterfront belongs through long term lease to non-native families, who have held them for years.  These paintings are emerging to reclaim images of where I live, and to relate them back to me.  It's strange to live somewhere and be of a place so fundamentally, but seeing it depicted only in a way that isolates my culture.

Mountain Lake oil on canvas 2018 by Anong Beam

It is this medium and genre of oil on canvas.

Sections of Tom Thomson's West Wind, and his Jack Pine, appear with Doig's Camp Forestia, alongside a ghost moose, myself swimming in the lake, my boat in Swallow Lake at first snow.

My father's recurring image of a rocket launch, birds and birds and birds!

An old Cadillac, fireworks, lakes, birds, bears, and the stars.

It is just immensely pleasurable to rectify this even if it is just in  my paint-world..  I love these painters as well and hold them no ill will!  Peter Doig, Tom Thomson, Kim Dorland, these men are painting their lives, and I am grateful to live in a time and place where I can do the same.

Beaver Dam Overflowing, oil on canvas 2018 by Anong Beam

Also, reaching deeper into art history, I'm happy to explore painting devices from Matisse (table with pansies, the joy of life) Botticelli Birth of Venus, Rothko's colour pairings, Georgia O'Keefe's skulls, and Agnes Martin's grids which influenced my father, back into me, into dancing elk herds.

It's really something to be the child of a famous artist.  It's intense, and I've seen so much of the art world that is unkind, and unhealthy.  I've seen my mother's pain inside that she was not recognized like her husband.  

But all that pales in the joy that I feel creating these landscapes, internal, wishful, desirous, wanton, exploding!  In some real ways they are ecstatic love stories to paint.

Deluge, oil on unstretched canvas, 2019 by Anong Beam

Being the first series where I have made all of my own oil paints, there is an incredible circuity to making paint from rocks from Bay Fine near Killarney, then painting that same scene with those rocks that are now paint!

Each image that I make I feel and I fall immersed in the history of painting, learning devices from those who have already travelled this path.

Miigwetch.

Anong Beam

detail of Deluge by Anong Beam

The text in this post is Anong Beam's powerful artist statement for her exhibition:  Anong Migwans Beam at Campbell House.  It was curated by Elka Weinstein.  I saw the show in July 2022 when it travelled to Manitoulin Island and was mounted in the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation. 

I admire how Anong has addressed the huge issue of white settler colonization / indigenous land and human rights with these multi-layered paintings.  These paintings appropriate subject and style of white male artists' paintings of iconic Canadian scenes.  Make no mistake.  This beautiful and tender and luscious work is also political. 

Red Cross Signature Quilt 1918

 this stunning antique commemorate's the 100th anniversary of armistice

It was made in 1918 as a fund raiser

nurses paid to have their signatures embroidered on the white cotton

This antique is currently on display at One Sky Gallery in Sudbury until November 11.

It has been used and shows age, but that adds to the poignancy

lest we forget

needle at sea bottom

illlustration from in the wilds by nigel peake

energy cloth, folded , the back

white stork spreads wings

wedding cloth, draped

needle at sea bottom

robert rauschenberg combine detail, flare chute

reach up to pat horse

robert rauschenberg  untitled 1955, combine painting

carry tiger to mountain

memory of my IV pump, August

go back to ward off monkey

 grasp birds tail

robert rauschenberg combine detail, sock

slanting flying

I started to learn and practice Tai Chi. last month.  The texts in this post are memory aids for this moving meditation.  There are 108 moves.

I am fascinated by the combination of mind and body that is inherent within tai chi.
I discover them as if they are new, but they have been around for years and years.

The images in this post are of things I do not own yet remember deeply.

"I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out of the real world"
Robert Rauschenberg  1925 - 2008

junko oki

More than often, studying something too much may lead to confusion - Junko Oki

 I used red thread to create stitches that capture my soul - Junko Oki

When I said to someone that I wanted to show both sides of my work, I was told that to do so was unprofessional.  I should only show my best side, the side which is more beautiful and commit to it. Sensible advice, buut I still want to show the back side.  Why?  I don't know.  Maybe finding a reason to that question is an important topic for me to pursue.  Junko Oki

When I touch an old fabric I feel like I'm going back in time.  Junko Oki

Memories can be implanted into material - Junko Oki

I want to make many small pieces.  I love to work spontaneously and follow the path my intuition leads me.  Junko Oki

All images and text in the above post are from Junko Oki's new book, Punk.

Art by contemporary artists like Junko Oki  combine with traditional folk textiles from around the globe as inspiration for the one day workshops I'm teaching in London this week.

The circle:  A universal symbol of wholeness and unity, timelessness, no beginning, no end, no above, no below.  Spacelessness.  Dynamic and endlessly moving, a complete cycle, natural perfection.  J. C. Cooper

nature's embroidery and a memory

When I was a little girl I hid in the pantry.
I wanted to see how long it would take before people missed me.

There was a hook on the kitchen side of the swing door, but none on the pantry side where I was.   My mother had sent me in for some can or box.

I didn't really intend to hide, but once I heard my mother lock the door from the kitchen side, I realized she had forgotten about me.

So it become a test.
How long would it take before people noticed I wasn't around?

It took forever.

Eventually I had to rattle the door.

Time Piece

 

 When can we finally tell our stories?

 

And to whom?

 

Or is it better to just remember them?

Here, a stitch resist and indigo memory cloth

the time I've made
which is not a place,
which is only a blur,
the moving edge we live in;
which is fluid
which turns back upon itself
like a wave

Margaret Atwood,
Cat's Eye p 409

this post linked to off the wall friday

because there are flowers

quilt at Mary's cottage (with Jack)

Recall

another quilt aat Mary's cottage

 Go on

the tablecloth Grace gave me

 Move forward

an antique quilt in the Ferguson homestead, Centennial museum of Sheguiandah 

If something is to come our way
It is through risk

Leading no one knows where

the tree of life painting I never finished (acrylic on 14 pieces of gessoed paper)

Because there are still flowers

There is the rose
forever opening for the first and last time

the weight of the thread in this antique embroidery helped me sleep

The heart of a rose is invisible
While being so much more visible than anything.

The text in this post is inspired by Luce Irigaray 

The images are from last summer's card in my camera.

April made that indigo quilt behind them, hand quilted in a hoop while they drove across the USA

I'm emptying that camera.

It's hard to let the summer go.