May 6, 2022
Eleven loads is 500 one-way steps, me counting like a donkey just curious to know. We are half way through the first day. By the end of the second we’ve clocked 20k and seventy flights of stairs each. We’re carrying boxes down and out, not up and in. By 8pm at the end we clean stove, fridge, shelves, floor, behind the toilet then close the door for ever and ever – O! the satisfaction, the blood flow, the brave, sore muscles that do not complain, as it turns out, two days later. Two point five women, moving and climbing mountains.
On the way back with a packed car through ancient Canadian Shield I see trumpeters at their nest – they were extinct just 30 years ago in Ontario – a lone female turkey, trees full of hunched turkey vultures. White pines brush the sky, cliffs of granite loom, rise, and plummet and I don’t care that this route takes longer, my heart is in full open song.
Yesterday through waking trees and fields the packed car delivers what it carries, and I get to wake up to the delicate songs of spring warblers. The osprey hunts, a white egret flies overhead, the loons sing the sunlight onto the eastern shore of the sound. Georgian Bay is gentle.
Fuelled by these wonders my work in studio has produced inks and fabric dyed with colours from ten different trees, a buffet of interesting resist experiments and paper dyed for book works. The canvases have shifted and morphed too, are more like sculptures emerging from stone – I find myself working subtractively with my layers. Like a curious donkey, noticing this.
I have a joint show coming up this November-December with Eileen Crenshaw at Centre3 – we’ve met and are having a grand time conspiring together. We’re calling it “After Lockdown”.
Throws – I’d planned five, but there will be three by Saturday (one of these is spoken for).
Open Studio at the Cotton Factory is tomorrow, Saturday May 7, 2022, from 4-11pm, and all sorts of things will be happening there. Do come if you can – wonders will abound, as they always do when the CF throws a block party. I’m at Studio SH242 in the Storehouse – enter anywhere and check a map. I’ll have hand tool paintings, Conversation Pieces, a few remaining pieces from IN PLACE (which pretty much sold out last December), and new work in progress for you to see. Cards, prints and two quilts available for sale as well – etransfer works a charm, no need to bring cash.
See you tomorrow!