Big Raven

Hapi and I have been sick the past week, I am recovered but I don't know if Hapi is. She looks un-Hapi and she hasn't eaten her dinner in a couple of days. She does eat any treats offered though and still likes her morning walk. No one else can see any sign of her not being her usual self. I'm thinking it is temporary, she's done this before.

As a result of not feeling well I have had no motivation to go outside for anything other than Hapi's walk and I have to say I am enjoying that. I did get out skating once and skiing once at the Reservoir. The skiing was interesting, I got a lot of advice on how to ski as I made my way around the ponds. The advice was coming from older dogwalkers who used to ski back in the day. I think they were envious, they wanted to ski too. Two mentioned that they still had their skis in storage somewhere, maybe they'd dig them out. I'm not a good skier so I don't mind advice. Who knows, maybe I'll have company for another ski.

Meanwhile back at the ranch I've been puttering around. I got it into my head to finish the woodcarving that I started in Toronto years ago, it has been sitting on a high shelf in a closet since I moved to Nova Scotia (in 2010). I got it down and looked at it.

Where are my carving tools? I spent a day ransacking the house looking for them. In the process, found all sorts of other interesting things and decided to throw away half of them. Interesting garbage, not much more than that. Found the tools.

Then I thought I'd rearrange the furniture in the living room so that Hapi's bed is closer to the armchair I usually sit it, I thought she might spend more time indoors if she could be closer to me. Did that. Didn't make a difference, she seemed to think the new location was a bit odd but she could live with it.

Where are the notes I took in the woodcarving class? Another day ransacking, but still haven't found them. I suspect I may have tossed the notebook they were in. After looking at the set of tools I realized that I have forgotten what many of them are for. I may have to find a book on it.

The instructor in the woodcarving class was a woman whose name I forget. Most of the students were older than me and had been in that class for years, they had a nice thing going. It was a 4-hour class, but halfway through they took a leisurely coffee break and sat at a round table together just chewing the fat. We each had our own project that we worked on independently and the instructor was available for advice. When I joined the class (I was only there for two years), she took several half-sessions to get me up and running, and she did that with every new student. We shared the tools, which were high quality carving tools that she provided. She was a professional carver, actually made a living doing it. It was a very relaxed fun time and I very much enjoyed listening to their stories. One carver was the same age as my Dad would have been and he had the same name! Both given and surnames! They were both in World War II, what an amazing coincidence.

My project is a bas relief (that is what she started everyone on, once you completed that you could do anything you wanted) based on an Emily Carr painting called Big Raven. I love almost everything Carr has done, but Big Raven is my favourite. The instructor approved of my choice, she said it was not too detailed and would transfer nicely to a bas relief.

The first step was to photocopy an illustration of that painting from a book and blow it up to the size of the bas relief, about 12"x16".

Then I laid out a slab of plasticine on a piece of masonite and transfered an outline of the photocopy to the plasticine by poking a needle through the photocopy along all the lines. I also traced the same lines onto a transparent film of mylar with a magic marker. I used the mylar outline to draw the picture onto a 2" thick slab of balsa wood.

The plasticine was for a mockup of the final bas relief, I started by carving the plasticine using the same tools I would use on the wood. Plasticine is a little more forgiving than wood if you make a mistake.

I started carving the wood before I completed the plasticine mockup, the idea was to always be a little further ahead on the plasticine than on the wood. Actually there are parts of the final bas relief that are started (some background details and a tree) that don't appear on the mockup. I don't remember why that is the case.

While I was writing this my neighbour phoned and we had a long conversation about this and that. By the time we were finished I had been given three assignments—call my son about his daughter, call another neighbour about a concert ticket, and call a mutual friend to arrange to go out for lunch this week—which I had to complete before getting back to this blog post. All done now. Texted my son, left a message about lunch, and reserved a ticket for Friday.

PS, I looked through old blog posts about my time in the woodcarving class, the instructor's name was Ruth.

Christmas prequal

The picture above is a handmade Christmas card by a talented friend. She vastly under estimates her own talent, insisting that her daughters are far more talented. They have obviously inherited her artistic talent but their style is very different from hers. She makes things simple, they make things more elaborate.

Busy pre-Christmas season. Three potluck dinners in one week. I actually find potlucks stressful, I never know what to make and am nervous that I will burn or otherwise make the food unappetizing or inedible. This year I bought two Christmas fruitcakes which I managed to stetch out over two of the potlucks, and baked an extra loaf of bread (I normally bake all my own bread, one of the few things I can make without mishap!). When a couple of people heard that I made sourdough bread, they requested a bit of sourdough starter so I made that too. I figure I got off light.

Christmas Day dinner will be at a neighbour's place, my contribution will be cheese and crackers, and broccoli. How hard can that be? Not, I hope. Someone else requested some starter and offered a kombucha scobie in exchange, I'm not sure how I feel about that. One more thing to keep alive! Ah well.

Then on Boxing Day a friend is having a bunch of people over because her son and daughter who live in other provinces will be here. A cause for celebration. She told me that her husband recently switched to non-alcoholic beer and they buy it at Superstore. She said it was very close to real beer, so I bought a 6-pack to try it. Especially over the holiday season when the law is out in force to catch inebriated drivers, I thought a nice non-alcoholic beer to take to parties would be good.

Finally, on the first Sunday of the New Year, another neighbour is having a single women's New Year celebration. She lives walking distance from me so I will leave the non-alcoholic beer at home and take something a little more fortified.

By the time all those dinners, parties and celebrations are done I will be more than ready to be a recluse for a while. It seems that I can only handle so much socializing before I just want to hide away from humanity.

This picture is of a Christmas gift from my eldest son. It depicts a lake in Ontario, Balsam Lake to be exact. As a child I spent all of my summers there. My parents retired and lived there until my father's death. My mother sold the house, she said it was too difficult to consider how to split it between four offspring, only one of whom remained in the province. Too bad. We each ended up inheriting the equivalent of a quarter share; the cash was nice but I miss the lake. Now I can put it on my wall.

There is one tiny island missing from this picture, the creator of the plaque said it was too difficult to include it. Here is an old photo of that island (Ant Island). It's that little black outline on the horizon between the two trees. I used to be able to swim there and back, it was the test you had to pass if you wanted to take a canoe out by yourself.

Art and Ginger at Avondale Sky

On Saturday I went to the Art Fair and Ginger Fest at Avondale Sky Winery. Had a ginger ice cream cone and walked around looking at art, crafts and craft foods (baked goods, chocolate, etc.).

Avondale Sky Winery

The last stall I came to was the art of a young man, Tylor McNeil, who was painting while selling prints of his art. When I arrived at his stall he got up and came around from behind his table to introduce himself, telling me all of the places he has lived so far and where he intends to live next. Then he started explaining his art, both his process and his subject matter. He told me the stories behind some of his prints. I asked a few questions and thanked him for telling me all this and then wandered off to find the friend I had come with and listen to some music.

I was really struck by his stories and a couple of his paintings. My friend and I decided that we had seen all there was to see and had no desire to stay any longer so I went back to the young man's stall and bought the two prints that had most appealed to me.

Letting Go - Tylor McNeil

The first one is called "Letting Go". It is the fourth in a series about his mother. The series is about the artist's coming to terms with his mother's alcoholism, and also about his remembrance of time spent in the garden with his mother when he was younger.

The Ghost of You - Tylor McNeil

The second one is called "The Ghost of You". The artist's father is dead now but he used to enjoy deer hunting. There are several prints in this series about his father as well, but I thought this one was the most haunting. My friend agreed, she was not particularly taken with the floral paintings (normally I am not either), but this one she said she would have bought too knowing nothing of the young man or his stories.

If I had come to his stall and he had just continued to paint or had just said something banal about his art prints, I don't think I would have bought either print. It was the stories he told about the prints that hooked me. When I look at the pictures I remember the stories and I feel a little of the emotion that must have gone into creating them.

Bygone colour

October 2016

A while ago I went plein air painting with an artist friend. I described the trip here. I am not totally pleased with the results, but I do have to keep reminding myself that I'm just a beginner so I should cut myself some slack.  So here are the results. Note that each picture appears darker on the left side, that is due to the lighting when I took the photo of the picture.

This was one I did a while ago from a photo in my artist friend's basement, as a kind of introduction to painting. My friend showed me a few things I could do so I cannot take responsibility/credit for every single brush stroke.

Practice, from photo

This one is from our first trip to Rock Notch Falls. Again, I had help.

Rock Notch Falls #1

This is from our second trip to the same location, but a different vantage point. Same waterfall, different view.

Rock Notch Falls #2

And the last one, also from the second trip, turning my easel around and painting the view behind me. I was concentrating so hard on the job that after one painting I was exhausted; my friend painted two or three in the same time span. However on the second trip to the falls I did manage to scrape together enough energy for the second painting.

Rock Notch Falls, behind me

I would like to keep up the activity through the winter and I have a standing invitation to my friend's basement. But I don't think I'll be doing anything this month, too much else to do.

+ + + + +

In other news, I had the maple tree in front of my house cut down yesterday morning. The picture at the top of this post is what it looked like when it was still healthy.

Tree down

It was diseased and had a split in the trunk, so it was likely that sooner or later that tree was going to come down in a storm. There were four lines---three phone or cable lines and one power line---running through it, so having it come down unaided would have been a disaster. I will miss greatly the shade it provided to my living room in the summer, but the liability of the tree was outweighing its benefits. Its roots were the cause of my earlier sewage disaster, and this fall it no longer displayed any colour. The leaves just turned black and brown and then fell off.

The other thing I will miss is that I used to have a bird feeder in that tree that I could watch from my living room window through the long winter months. Some of the local chickadees were not happy about the loss of the tree, they came by to watch and even at one point perched on the chain saw while the feller took a smoke break. There is no realistic alternative to hanging the feeder in that tree so this winter the birds and I will have to do without. That I will definitely miss, perhaps even more than the summer shade.

A glimpse into family history

So, last week a long-awaited (16 years!) package arrived at the post office for me. It is a painting that was given to my grandparents back in the '50s that my mother inherited and I in turn inherited from her. But it came with a condition: it must first go to my mother's sister for the rest of her lifetime. Who knew she would be so long-lived (95 years)! She died a year ago so the painting finally became mine, but since she lived and died on the west coast her children gave the painting to my brother (also on the west coast) to take care of sending to me. We dithered for a year about how to do that and finally he put it in the mail a few weeks ago. Surface mail being the cheaper option and an extra week or so of waiting after 16 years not being outlandish, that was how it arrived. Unscathed (we worried about it).

I posted a photo of the painting on Facebook and then in the Comments section my brother and I argued about its origins and meaning. It was an interesting argument that among other things involved internet searches of family history and the posting of various photos supporting our differing opinions. Yesterday my brother sent an email message to various family members seeking further information, it will be interesting to see what evolves from that.

Portion of a wartime letter from family friend to my grandmother, 1916 give or take

The painting supposedly represents a visit to my grandparents' summer place by persons unknown (or rather, disputed). I believe it was painted by our great-aunt Evelyn and that she is one of the figures in the painting. My brother thinks it might have been painted by a family friend representing his visit to our grandparents. The family friend was a wartime buddy (World War I) of our grandfather's with a great sense of humour and cartooning ability. My brother's supporting evidence is the photocopy of a letter written by the friend taped to the back of the painting when he received it. My evidence for supposing that Evelyn painted it is a written inscription on the back of the painting gifting the painting from Evelyn to our grandparents, and another painting I possess that she painted (indicating that she was indeed capable of producing this piece of art).

The family mansion, 1896. My great grandfather and possibly Evelyn sitting on the verandah

In the course of our internet research, we found several photos of Evelyn and our grandmother at the home of their grandparents in Toronto (actually, I think it would have been the outskirts of Toronto at that time). Turns out our great-great-grandfather was very wealthy (the founder of a bank that still exists today) and his home was a mansion that might be considered a Canadian version of Downton Abbey. I have a notebook written by Evelyn in which she describes the life at her grandparents in very Downton Abbey-like terms: servants, stables, governesses, and her mother having no idea how to cook or even hold a broom. And as it turns out, I briefly attended the church (as a child) that stood on land that he donated from his large country estate. That church is a prominent church in central Toronto today.

Evelyn is the young woman in a white blouse standing on the steps, my grandmother is the young girl all in white sitting on the grass. 1900

The thing I found most interesting about all this is that the photo of my grandmother at age 7 or 8 looks remarkably like me at that age. I was not fond of this grandmother when she was alive, but she played a big role in my young life. Among other things my father disliked her intensely and my parents very nearly divorced over that. I remember that period of time too well, it was quite frightening for a young child. However the storm passed, my father did come to terms with his mother-in-law, and the marriage survived. I regret that I did not get to know her better, from what I have learned of her life she was an interesting person in interesting times.

On not going to the art gallery

I went to the city yesterday to visit a friend who just got out of hospital and to go to the art gallery. My friend--I'll call her Jane--had said she wanted to go to the art gallery too, so I was expecting to pick her up and go for lunch and then the gallery. I brought along another mutual friend (let's call her Beth). Well, when Beth and I got to Jane's place it turned out that Jane didn't feel like going to the art gallery but did want to go for lunch. I was disappointed but went along with the change of plan. Jane is blind and in a wheel chair. Beth is also blind, but not in a wheel chair. Both women can sort of see, but they are both legally blind. Beth told me later that she couldn't look at me, she just knew how I was feeling about giving up the art gallery visit.

Anyway, we went for lunch. The restaurant we went to had excellent food but it was crowded and extremely noisy. It was hard to hear each other talking, so I kind of spaced out. Plus, Jane is not well at all and is on medical marijuana for pain and she was kind of stoned, so conversation with her was limited. People talk about medical marijuana as if it was so superior to synthetic drugs, but from what I can see it has its problems just like any drug. Jane said it dulled the pain but the price for it was being stoned all the time.

After lunch Jane wanted to visit a nearby shop so we did that. It turned out the shop was selling off all its stock in preparation for a move to an area too far away for Jane to visit, so I guess going there when we did was a good thing; Jane got one last kick at that can. But I'm not an enthusiastic shopper and felt like I was basically there as a guide to read labels and identify various objects for sale. No art gallery, just shopping instead.

After a while we walked Jane home and dropped her off. On the drive back to the Valley I commented to Beth that Jane did not look good. I hadn't seen her since before she went into the hospital and she clearly was much worse than she had been then. Beth said, "Somebody had to mention the elephant in the room!" It is not pleasant watching an old friend slide away.

Being the only sighted person with two blind people is a little stressful. I never used to pay attention to the obstacles for a wheel chair but now I do. It is shocking how little thought goes into all the little ramps that are supposed to make it easier for wheel chairs to navigate sidewalks. I have to keep an eye out for everything, give verbal warnings of red lights, rough terrain, when to turn, when to avoid other pedestrians and so forth. Not to mention reading menus out loud and identifying objects in shops and reading their price tags.

I have such mixed feelings about that trip! I really wanted to go to the art gallery and was seeing that as the main point of the whole trip. It was hard to let go of that. Jane had said she wanted to go too, but I guess she was a little naive about her energy level. She was still in the hospital when we planned the trip, she probably had no idea how hard it was going to be living outside the hospital.

Much as I want to participate in get togethers with Jane and Beth, it is really draining for me; I come home exhausted and irritable. I would do better if it was just one or the other, but Beth can't go into the city to see Jane on her own, she needs a chauffeur. So all in all it was not a fun trip for me. But I can't not do it. Jane will never get better. There is a time limit and then the relationship will be gone for good and I don't know when that time limit is.

...Art...

Again with the AGO

I love Toronto. I don't want to leave.

When I am in Vancouver, I love Vancouver and don't want to leave.

When I am in Wolfville, I love Wolfville and don't want to leave.

Anyway, I love being here in Toronto.

I go to the dogpark every morning and see some of my favourite neighbours and their dogs, it's a great way to start the day. However a couple of days ago, three of the dogs---including Dobby---were chasing each other around the field and simultaneously ran into Barbara from the rear, bowling her over and breaking her ankle. The dogs of course were oblivious and careened off as if nothing had happened, but Barbara was left lying on the ground in considerable pain. One of the dogs that knocked her down was her own dog, we are now taking turns walking him since Barbara is confined to home in a cast.

Today I went to the Art Gallery of Ontario and spent a few hours wandering around the different galleries. There were special exhibits of Henry Moore and Shary Boyle, as well as the regular exhibits. I especially wanted to see the African gallery since I didn't get there on my last two visits, however it was somewhat reduced due to the Henry Moore exhibit.

I have never had any particular interest in Henry Moore, I know him only as the sculptor who did The Archer in front of Toronto City Hall. But I learned two things of interest about him that made me a little bit more interested in his work. One was that he studied aboriginal and African art and took a lot of inspiration from those sources, and the other was that he was the survivor of a gas attack during World War I. Of his battalion of 400 men, only 52 survived and Moore was marked for life by the ghastly experience. These two things were great influences in his art, and after learning those facts about him I could see that it was true when I went into the gallery where his sculpture was displayed. His figures have distinctively African appearances, and some of the imagery seems to me a little haunted.

In the African art gallery I watched part of a video of a West African artist talking about his work. He talked about his mother and how she had joined the ancestors, he said how fundamentally different the African view of life and our position in it is from the conventional western view. When I was walking around the AGO that idea reverberated everywhere for me.

Sometimes it seems to me that our conventional view of what constitutes reality is but a thin sliver of what is possible. When we look at things from the point of view of different cultures, we get a glimpse of things we hardly can imagine. Listening to that African artist speak about his mother joining the ancestors, I caught a view of life that is endless, and tried to imagine what it would be like to live within that framework as my everyday reality. Looking at works of art by aboriginal artists who worked within mythological frameworks very different from our European-centred western mythology, I tried to imagine worlds of strange gods and goddesses, spirits and myths that might permeate my everyday life. Where the spoon I ladle soup with is carved in the shape of some totem animal or spirit with a meaningful story I might think about every time I served a bowl of soup. Or not. I might use that spoon so often that I don't even see the carving.

I don't know how well I am communicating what was going through my head looking at all this art, but it seemed like in every gallery I was transported to a different way of looking at the world. When I walked through the European galleries, my conventional worldview came into focus, but I could see it as just another way, one of many.

There were a couple of interesting quotes on the walls of the art gallery. One was that when aboriginal people saw European artists going around painting what they saw in North America, they perceived it as a way for Europeans to possess the land, that by painting it they were tacitly expressing ownership of it. I would guess that European artists didn't see it that way, they probably simply saw it the same way we see taking photographs. Although, isn't it funny that when painting or photographing something we talk about "capturing" it?

The other was a quote from Ansel Adams the great American photographer:

"Myths ... are heroic struggles to comprehend the truth of the world."

A couple of galleries of European art were devoted to Biblical subjects, a good deal of one gallery centred on the story of Jesus' crucifixion. There were also quite a few paintings around the birth of Jesus, and I was thinking about the focus on birth and death so obvious in these paintings. There were no works of art devoted to what Jesus actually taught. I was thinking about how that particular religion, Christianity, seems to focus on a very mythological birth story and a rather horrific death story, and that very little of what Jesus taught seems to be central to the faith. If you want to be considered an official Christian, you need to acknowledge a creed of belief in those two events plus a third, a very mythological resurrection story. I remember once attending a class on the basic tenets of Christian belief, and the major lesson I learned was that the point of Jesus' life was to "die for our sins", which always struck me as a very odd purpose in life. I have great respect for the teachings attributed to Jesus, but not a lot for the strange slant subsequently applied to his life and unfortunate end.

I'm rambling. But thinking about all this in the context of the Ansel Adams quote, that myths are heroic efforts to understand the truth of the world, I just wonder what kind of truth we are getting at in the mythology of Jesus' life, which seems to be the fundamental myth of our European/western worldview. Not that the myths of other cultures aren't equally horrific. There was a painting by Emily Carr of Sonoqua, a kind of northwest coast Wild Woman of the Woods that mothers used to scare their kids into good behaviour ("if you don't behave, Sonoqua will get you!"), and another of an Inuit sea goddess who performed a similar role in their culture. And in one gallery there was displayed a buffalo robe of a 19th century Plains' Indian that was inscribed with pictures relating the exploits of his life, killing one Indian after another and managing to steal a herd of horses. Quite the heroic life.

I guess we humans are fundamentally fascinated by birth and death, beginnings and endings, and the question of whether that's all there is or if there is some greater context for our finite lives.

More textile arts

The other exhibit we went to see at the Textile Museum was called People Place and Thing, it consisted of three mini-exhibits. I am not sure why they called it that, but the names of the mini-exhibits made a little more sense.

The first one is called Skin and Bone. The artist, David Halper, has applied some very interesting embroidery to various furs and skins.

The most striking is a large embroidery of a woman on the flank of a full-sized horse. The horse looks real, but it is a model of a horse covered in cowskin, complete with fur.


Then there is a series of embroideries of shadow creatures on animal hides. For example a shadow eagle with the two hands held up to create the shadow. The embroidery is accurate enough to be able to follow it to create your own shadow eagle.


A little bizarre was the set of faces embroidered onto the cross-sections of deer lying on the floor. Each "deer" was a full-sized model of the front half of a deer. Something just a little macabre about that display.


But the embroidery was amazing, the level of detail and shading in the portraits very impressive.


The second mini-exhibit was Faces and Mazes. Here, the artist Lia Cook has executed woven hangings that look like photographs in the level of detail. She used computer software to translate pictures into weaving instructions. The close-up detail of how it was done has a maze-like quality to it, and one hanging actually looks like a maze. Then it looks like a close-up of the weave structure, but when you look at it closely, it is essentially patches of black and white woven in very fine detail. Her work is fascinating, you can get lost in it. Most of the faces were doll faces, but some were actual baby faces.


The third exhibit was called Stumble, it consisted of outsized male heads and figures put together with bits of fabric sewn together and then inflated to form three dimensional figures. The technique was interesting; apparently the artist (Stephen Schofield) wets down the fabric with sugar water and then inflates it, the sugar in the water stiffens the fabric as the water evaporates so that the figure holds its three dimensional shape. To take it down, it is sprayed with ordinary water which washes out the sugar and deflates the figure. The figures are remarkably well done, you can see the musculature reproduced in the fabric.


Of the three exhibits, the last one interested me the least, but only because I have a personal interest in embroidery and weaving; I might be more interested in Stumble if I was a quilter.

The last special exhibit we saw was of Orenburg Shawls. Orenburg is a Russian town, they knit shawls there out of local wool. The shawls are uncommonly light and warm, they are knitted up in lacy patterns. When you see how fine the lace is, you wonder how such a shawl could keep you warm. The description of the display noted that when Russia became Communist, the production of the shawls was collectivized, but after the Communist era ended it went back to being a cottage industry as it was before 1917. Women are so resilient, they just keep on keeping on!

Another life

He was in his early 50s---53 to be exact---when he was laid off by the hospital. He worked in a lab there. They gave him a severance package and a counsellor, and sent him on his way.

The counsellor was actually quite helpful, told him the best way to handle his severance for tax purposes and encouraged him to go back to school. She told him there was money available for retraining but it would take time for the application to go through so he should get that started right away. He could figure out what he wanted to study later.

Well, this was in Ontario's Bob Rae days and that counsellor wasn't kidding about there being money available. However she grossly overestimated how long it would take for Walter's application to go through, he had hardly submitted it when they told him it was approved.

Now what school was that again that he intended to go to?

He had no idea.

He did know that at 53 finding another job was going to be darn hard, but he didn't have a clue what he wanted to study or retrain for. The counsellor helped him fill in applications for various community colleges.

He grew up in Saskatchewan, when they said they wanted his high school transcript he was dumbfounded. His graduation diploma had been typed out on a slip of paper, how could he expect to get a transcript? But he wrote away for it and I guess that high school managed to type out a transcript for him, 35 years later.

Most of the colleges he applied to said forget it. They weren't interested in his transcript or him. But he got a call from somebody in Admissions at Centennial College who told Walter to come down right away and talk to him.

Walter hurried down with his transcript, the fellow glanced at it and said, "You're in! Now what was it that you wanted to study?"

Walter didn't know.

So together they went through the college prospectus, and ended up selecting some art classes for him. The fellow told Walter that he could use these classes to put together a portfolio if he wanted to apply to OCAD, the Ontario College of Art and Design.

Walter spent a couple of years at Centennial. He'd never studied art before, but he had the most wonderful time at Centennial doing art of all kinds. By the end of his time there he was pretty sure he wanted to go on to OCAD, and he was pretty sure that the thing he wanted to study there was silk screening.

Walter applied to OCAD, was accepted, and then he applied to have his two years at Centennial accepted as the equivalent of the first two years at OCAD. They agreed. So another two years at OCAD, painting, sculpting, photographing, weaving and of course silk screening, and now he had a degree in art.

Walter owned a house. He bought it when he was in his 40s, back when interest rates were through the roof but house prices were still reasonable. He worked diligently to pay off the mortgage and in ten years he was debt-free. So when he got laid off he owned his own home free and clear, and he had a little bit in savings. Between the help that the Bob Rae government gave him and his own resources, he managed to survive four years of school. After that he just kept taking courses in things that interested him, quilting, weaving, this, that and the other thing.

He says he never thought he'd manage a "Freedom 55", but I guess he did, and two years early at that.

Walter started a small business. It was not intended to be a big moneymaker, but he loved to shop and he had an awful lot of stuff that eventually he had to get rid of if he wanted to continue to buy new things. So he started selling his puchases at the St. Lawrence flea market, then later he got space at an antique mall.

The antique mall suits him perfectly. He has space there for his items, mostly china and pottery, and the operators of the mall handle the sales and take a percentage of the sale price. He periodically shows up to resupply his space when his items have been sold. He goes to second hand stores to browse for more, occasionally goes to yard sales, and has handled one or two estates for people. It's perfect, enough work to keep him moving and learning, not so much to tire him out or prevent him from pursuing other interests.

I sit next to Walter in weaving class. He's been in this class for around 12 years now. He's working on a large tapestry based on a photo of a lake surrounded by multi-coloured trees and rocks.

He's been working on this particular tapestry for a couple of years.

He's in no rush.

War prayer rug

Yesterday I bought a war rug.


In my weaving class, one of the women is a volunteer at the Textile Museum of Canada. She told me that their director, Max Allen, was selling off a bunch of Afghan war rugs that he had collected in a special sale to benefit the museum. You had to buy a membership in the museum and then could pay $50 for your choice of small rugs available, about 80 of them. You could also bid on one or more of the larger rugs that would be on display.

The sale was yesterday. I went downtown to the sale location to arrive right at opening time, but there were already fifty people ahead of me, and Max had decided that each person could buy up to two rugs apiece. I guess he was worried not enough people would come to buy the rugs.

Of course, they sold out within ten minutes of opening the doors. When I got in, there were three rugs left, and two of them appeared to be claimed by a young couple standing by them. I picked up the third rug.

I've kind of been thinking about getting a membership in the Textile Museum, so this was an incentive to do it. And looking up my rug on warrug.com, I figure it is probably worth around $200. Some of the larger rugs that were snapped up in the first few seconds of the sale were in the thousand dollar range.

As you can see from the picture, this is not the most beautiful rug, filled as it is with images of war (mostly vehicles, some rugs are more blatant with images of weapons). It is small, about 2.5 x 1.5 ft. This would be a prayer rug. Can you imagine praying on a rug like this? What would you be praying for? Or about?

I wrote last year about the war rug exhibit at the Textile Museum, and there is a lot of information at warrug.com about this subject. There are also videos of Max Allen speaking on the subject (a short video here, and a longer one here). He was at the sale, wandering around explaining the details of the rugs, about how they were made, how you could tell where they came from, what the imagery signified, that sort of thing.

I think the beauty of this rug for me is in its construction and its backstory. I do not know the details of the weaver's life and circumstance but I do know some generalities. She is most likely a woman. She incorporates images from her life, and with Afghanistan being a battlefield for more than thirty years now, war defines her life. In all likelihood she lives or has lived in a refugee camp. She may have learned her craft there, she most certainly was influenced by the refugee camps.

Before the war, Afghan women rarely left their home towns, and this was reflected in the design of their rugs, you could tell where a rug came from by the details of its design and imagery. No more, for weavers forced into refugee camps learned the styles of weavers all over their country, they melded their imagery and techniques. Today it is very difficult to tell where an Afghan rug was made, there is very little specific imagery based on locale.

They say you should write about what you know, weavers weave what they know.

Art and life

On Thursday a friend and I went to the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) to see the Canadian collection. We went before Christmas and only made it through the European collection on the ground floor, so it was our intention to go back in the new year to see the rest. As usual these things take time to organize, so we only made it back in mid-February.

We started with Krieghoff, an artist born in Europe who came to Canada in the early 19th century and painted what he saw. There were a lot of winter scenes, mostly set in the Quebec countryside, of people engaged in various winter activities, a lot of which seemed to involve getting drunk and tipping over horse-drawn sleighs full of laughing people flying into the snowbanks. It was interesting to see the clothing, some wore furs with the fur side out, others wore them with the fur side in, like the Inuit do. The long red stocking caps that many wore immediately identified these people as Quebec habitants.

In many of the paintings there is a structure that I have seen in Nova Scotia, related to the early Acadians. It is a roadside cross, standing maybe 12 or 16 feet high, with a metal ring at the cross pieces, and an angled cross on the metal ring made of two arrows. I'm not sure what it is supposed to signify, but it appeared in many of his paintings. I've seen it in one Alex Colville painting as well. Apparently it was significant to both Acadians and Quebecois.

There were other 19th century paintings that try to convey the landscape and the native people, but tinged with a European perspective. There were mountains in the background, and native people and tipis in the foreground, but something about the way the scenes were painted conveyed a very European countryside feeling. Stately trees, very European peasant-like native people. Some portraits of First Nations people looked for all the world like dark-skinned Europeans. A portrait of Joseph Brant showed a gentleman who looked very European except for the Mohawk hairstyle.

The AGO has a great collection of Group of Seven paintings. There are whole rooms devoted to each artist in the group, and it really gave you a sense of their differences and similarities. One room split in half contained paintings by two of the Group of Seven (one was MacDonald, I don't remember who the other one was) and the paintings were mostly produced in the late teens early '20s up in the Algoma region of Ontario. So the subject matter was pretty much the same but the sense of the landscapes soo-o-o-o different! MacDonald showed the forest just boiling with life, a riot of trees, water, undergrowth, rocks. The other artist showed the forest as a place of deep stillness, the sky was not simply a background as in MacDonald's paintings but a living part of the whole landscape. Amazing how two artists can see the same landscape so differently.

Along the front of the AGO on the second level is the Galleria Italia, with one wall and the roof being a single curved expanse of glass. On the facing wall are huge upright planks bolted to the wall, each one maybe 14" wide and 8" or 10" deep. They appear to have cutaways with trees inserted into them, but what they really are is the plank has been carved in such a way as to reveal the heartwood as a tree trunk within the plank, complete with branches sticking out and back into the plank. So what it looks like is a tree within a plank. On the floor are similar planks on legs like benches, except they all have "Do Not Touch" signs on them so you can't sit down. They've been similarly cut, only the heartwood is now hollowed out and filled with something that looks like golden sap (since you're not allowed to touch I don't know if it is really liquid or some kind of plastic resin made to look like a liquid). So instead of seeing the tree inside the plank, you see the empty space left by removing the tree from the plank.

Interesting idea, but I don't think they should put something that looks awfully like a bench out and then cover it with "Do Not Touch" signs!

We went for lunch in the basement cafeteria. My friend told me about the art therapy program she is taking, she's in the second year of a three year program. This term her class is doing Veil Painting. She said that they focussed on their own lives in seven year stages, and did one painting representing each stage. Using various exercises they try to get in touch with the major elements of each period for them, so for example my friend said that what she got in touch with in her first seven years was pure joy. The next seven years she said was all about legs and arms and elbows and knees. For her third period she was quite shocked by the revelation of her sense of failure, of being a failure.

In class she related the events that led up to her failing a grade in school then, after having been one of the better performing students in school. But one of her classmates pointed out that she did not "fail", she deliberately sabotaged herself by refusing to study or do homework. She set herself up to fail. She said this was a big revelation for her and it completely changed her view of herself in realizing this. All these years she has worked and lived under the cloud of being a failure, traced back to this single event in her teen years, and she wasn't a failure at all, she just set it up to look like that. She said that it felt like a huge weight lifted from her shoulders, a new beginning. This only happened recently, so she wonders if the feeling will stick or is going to be shortlived, but she thinks it is a major turning point in her view of herself, she thinks it will stick.

Amazing how our beliefs about ourselves can be formed based on interpretations of past events, that could just as easily be interpreted in another way.

Healing

Wednesday is my class day, weaving, carving and tai chi. The tai chi remains a challenge, I wonder if I am ever going to get it. In carving I continue to chip away at the wood around the Big Raven, I wonder if I will ever get to actual carving. Maybe next week. I filled two large dust bins with wood chips in the course of the afternoon.

In the morning weaving I do feel like I am making progress though. I've finished the sections of basic weaving and am now working on the parts where you have to be able to "read" the pattern that Line has created for our samplers. She spent a few minutes instructing Kendra and I in how to do that. Line also brought her finished tapestry called Healing. It is a brightly coloured abstract tapestry, about five feet long and a foot and a half wide. Very beautiful. It is the second in a series she is doing.

She also read to us a little essay she had written based on her experience creating this tapestry. She said that during the long process she felt many times that she was making mistakes, it wasn't working the way she designed it, there were problems with it that any fool could see. She said that feelings of defeat, failure, not being good enough and so forth came up continuously. But she realized that the weaknesses, mistakes and failings of this particular work were part of its character, part of the whole creation process.

And she realized the same things about herself, that her own failures and weaknesses were part of her character, part of who she was, not to be lamented but to be celebrated as part of what made her who she was. She said she felt a constant tugging to be down on herself for her various faults and weaknesses, but this was to be resisted.

She pointed out that when we create something we are intimately aware of its faults and our mistakes in creating it, when everyone else is admiring and being impressed by it. We should embrace our flaws as well as our strengths, the sum of it all is who we are and as an act of creation to be celebrated.

Getting there

Yesterday was my school day, all day spent in weaving, carving and tai chi. I feel like I turned a corner in all three classes.

In the weaving class I finally got my warp successfully strung on the loom and could start actually weaving, I managed to get just over six inches done.

In wood carving I mostly spent the class chipping away a lot of the wood. My project is based on an Emily Carr painting that I happen to like a lot, called Big Raven. I have to remove about half the wood in the areas that will be sky and background, so that the raven and the foreground will stand out, I should have most of that done by next class and can start carving the raven itself.

In tai chi I think I'm finally getting it, I was able to do most of the form without getting too lost this time. We're learning the 24 form version, but even that is hard to learn. I tend to focus on the arm movements, but the instructor wants us to focus on breathing and footwork. Interesting. Anyway, it's coming along.

Last week only five of us showed up due to the weather, and this week the instructor wanted to push on to the next positions. But most of the class was lost because they weren't there last week. So one person asked for a review, the instructor asked the class to vote on whether to review or move on, and review won. I was glad of that.

I have an appointment next week at the naturopathy clinic, hopefully they'll have something useful for me to try for my Brain Fog. I was supposed to go to the art gallery with Beth today but she called to cancel because it was so cold and she didn't want to be standing at the bus stop in the cold. I was so tired after yesterday that I was happy to have a day to piddle around.

Textile Museum, part II: War Rugs of Afghanistan

The plaque on the wall at the start of this exhibit says it all.

There have never been rugs like this before.

This exhibit at the Canadian Textile Museum was amazing, shocking, beautiful, haunting.








A traditional Persian or Afghan rug is based on the concept of a walled garden, beautiful flowers, birds and trees represented in the centre or main body of the rug, and a protective wall or border surrounding it all.

Look closely and you will see in this rug that weapons and military vehicles have replaced the flowers, trees and animals. Click the image to see a more detailed view of it.







All of these carpets were filled with images of war, either blatantly or subtly.







Four million Afghans have fled to refugee camps, one of the largest refugee populations ever. People who had lived their entire lives in small villages, never travelling very far, now trekked across their country to find safe haven, passing through cities for the first time ever. They have ended in massive refugee camps, people from all parts of this country jumbled together. Once you could tell where a rug came from by its unique design and patterns, now the rug weavers from all over share images and weaving heritages in the camps, it is impossible to tell anymore where a rug comes from, or whether its content is a comment for or against war.

A kalashnikov is an Aghan man's most prized possession.

















A very sad rug, a lady lute player surrounded by tanks and grenades.

















Afghans have been exposed to the world, whether by foreign soldiers, news broadcasts on TV, or their own relatives fled to other countries and sending postcards home. Several of the displayed rugs showed foreign cities: Melbourne, Paris, London, New York. Each one incorporating weapons and machinery of war (a carpet depicting London showed the sky filled with bombers).

This rug shows the Twin Towers of New York City.





Afghans struggle to understand what is going on in their country through the stories and symbols of mythology. This rug depicts the story of Rustam and the dragon, how Rustam's trusty horse Rakhsh saved his master and aided in the destruction of the dragon.











This rug is a symbolic representation of the battle between good and evil, being fought in the land of Afghanistan.








The military insignia worn as patches by foreign soldiers are a rich source of images and symbols for Afghan weavers.





This rug bears a terrible message. In the centre you see a butterfly. At the bottom you see the butterfly landmine (small pink shape). This was widely used by Soviet soldiers, and Afghan children would pick them up because they looked like interesting toys, with devastating results.

Afghanistan is still heavily mined, most of the Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan action were killed by landmines. Some of the rugs depict Afghans with missing limbs, due to landmines.

The Ottawa Convention (Mine Ban Treaty) was signed by 122 nations in 1997, banning the use of anti-personnel landmines. Princess Diana worked hard for this treaty, and her death spurred many recalcitrant nations to ratify it. However, thirty nations have yet to sign, including Russia, India, China and the United States. Although this treaty was historical in gaining widespread ratification of a weapons ban, it is still almost useless because those four great nations refuse to sign.

The exhibit included a slide show of photos gleaned from various websites depicting the war in Afghanistan. A few minutes of watching the endless loop of grim photos conveyed what a little of what it was like to live there.

The photos in the slide show are mostly taken by foreign soldiers and show what they see there every day. There were a very few photos of battlefields, but most of the photos were of everyday life. It painted a pretty grim picture. Thirty years of war! Many people there have never known another way of life!

This exhibit of exquisite workmanship and artistry is indeed an eye-opener!