WHERE I COME FROM is a good question. When I was about three years old my mother read me a children’s book pointing to a tiny white dot, just a barely visible spec on a big black rectangle in the middle of a book about that very question. She told me that this was the size of the seed was that came from my father. So very small. Over the past seventy odd years I’ve wrestled with that question of origin at other levels; begotten not made. My mother didn’t create me as a work of art. She bore me.
I’m very proud to be going back to the city where I was born to rediscover some of the geography of my birth as well as trying to answer some of the questions about the origin of my own creative roots in painting and dance. I claim that I create through the kinesthetic sense and that my awareness, or at least “her” awareness, of my being was from the first time I began kicking in my mother’s uterus. (We used scientific terms for anatomy when I was growing up). I am still kicking as I paint albeit with my hand and whole body as I hold a brush or other implement.
In September I return to Winnipeg the place of my birth in November 1939. Having left Winnipeg just before the age of two, I surprisingly do have a few memories, spatial and kinesthetic, of playing hide and seek under the dining table with grandmother Kibblewhite. Or standing in my crib and teething on the white lead paint rails. Or butting my head against the top of the crib as I slept on my stomach by preference. I do wonder if any trace memories might emerge as I seek out the houses and churches still standing where I enjoyed those first almost two years in Manitoba. World war II erupted the month I was born ending the preoccupation of Manitobans’ economic hard times of the depression which my family endured.
I am interested in the culture of Manitoba and the social activism of the 1930s as well as the musical culture of the city which was core to my mothers artistic being as a soprano soloist. I would have had the gift of her breath and the joy of her song as I grew inside her.
Most of the paintings of the last few years have been abstract expressive improvisations. There is no idea of form or image in my mind as I am careful to empty my mind through a mediation before picking up my brush. Yet it can often be that tiny spec on the canvas, that mark, or “seed”, which subliminally precipitates a cascade of gestures, an “event”, which becomes the painting. These gestural moves are experienced as a dance energy coming out of my body.
In Winnipeg I fantasize that there might emerge some uncanny connection with the geomatic coordinates of where I began. Houses of early toddlerhood still exist. The anticipation of this journey is energizing current painting work!
WHERE I COME FROM follows last years BC exhibition COMING FROM NOWHERE.
The new show opens September 24 at St John’s College, the University of Manitoba in “The Quiet Room” The official opening reception is Tuesday September 25 from 3 to 5 pm with an artist talk at 2:30.
The show is curated by Dr. Brenda Cantelo