The ice went out

March 1 2024

When we left on our road trip at the beginning of March, the ice still covered Manitowaning Bay,  

and while we were gone, the ice went out.  

March 15 2024

Over the past few days, I've finished the couching on my new wool textile.  I love to hold the heavy cloth.   I love to run my hand over the dense threads.  I love how the six strands of cotton floss have a sheen and the red sewing thread that holds it has a strength.

Did you know that the back is red silk?  

Last Thursday, I placed an organza circle and regarded it.  What should I do?  I worried and obsessed for a complete day.  It was snowing outside.

Ann Clarke, RCA acrylic painter, at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston Ontario, 2024.

By the way, one of the reasons that we made the trip to Eastern Ontario was so that I could attend an artist talk by my former Lakehead University painting teacher.  She was having a 6 decade retrospective at the Agnes Etherington gallery in Kingston.  My sister, Nancy, and I went together.  When it was time for me to graduate from LU in 1993, it turned out that I needed a painting credit and Ann Clarke had just arrived in Thunder Bay.  I was privileged to have this dedicated abstract painter as one of my advisors and teachers.  I wrote about her retrospective on the Modernist Aesthetic blog, please go have a look.  

March 18

March 23

This view.

It is very important to my work.  I lose myself in it.  

Sacred Ground by Judy Martin, wool and hand stitch.  

drawing with touch

A drawing with thread

framed without glass, sewn to a linen-covered board

and placed on a wall with Tortoise (my sister's acrylic painting)  and the Energy Cloth I made in 2011.

Just looking.

To see an earlier presentation, entirely different,  click here.  

Cloud Over Water

Cloud Over Water, Paterson Ewen 1979.  Acrylic and Metal on gouged plywood 

I visited this painting by Canadian Artist Paterson Ewen (1925 - 2002) again last weekend.   
It is one of my favourites in the Art Gallery of Ontario's permanent collection.

I can imagine what it must have been like to make it.  The three pieces of heavy wood lifted to a surface and then drawn into with a noisy router. Why?
Because those marks had everything to do with the emotional connection from artist to viewer that comes with the sense of touch.

Ewen's muscular methods connect with my own body's haptic memory.  There is a sense of time and labour in this work that somehow,  in addition to the horizon imagery, sets me off.  I go into my own world. 

My sister Nancy came to Manitoulin to see Dad and we met in Toronto first.
Nancy's an artist and has two web sites.  Here and here.