Keira McArthur

For Fran, 1936-2022.

March’s social media is a-twitter with #WomensHistoryMonth, #5WomenArtists… This question has arisen, from the thoughtful and compelling minds of the National Museum of Women’s Art NMWA in Washington, DC:  off the top of your head, can you name 5 women Artists, from any era?  I can, but then I’m a painter, and I studied art history […]

Heart and mind, heart and mind. I was teaching a transcribed Bach Air to one of my cello students today and was brought to tears, once again, by the beauty of that music.  Such a dance between air and sea, earth and sky, leaf and root. I’d forgotten what day it was, actually, until my […]

The morning raising of the bedroom window blind reveals a bright blue pipeline stretching east-west across the backyards of our neighborhood block, turning north at my forsythia bush. I look out the front of the house onto our street and it’s filled with orange trudging men. It’s raining water and corn snow as I ask […]

Snow is both light and heavy, slow and fast, visible and not. It’s a season of contrast. I live in a Canadian province that stretches from Windsor/Detroit (on a latitudinal par with Northern California) to Hudson’s Bay – a stretch between 42 and 57N; from carolinian forest to tundra – “Ontario is Canada’s second largest […]

As predicted, each painting for #Selfie has had it’s own arc of becoming.  They have all been surprises, have all taught me things I wouldn’t otherwise know. It’s been a privilege to be at the centre of this project and participate in the discovery, the shaping and polishing of each facet.  Quite a geological process […]

There’s a subtle art to avoidance – one can accomplish a great deal when motivated by discomfort with a project’s requirements:  Go work out – more often.  Coach at GBSS’ annual music clinic; play at elementary schools in Bruce County for GBS.  Go see Art of Time’s Cadmium Red with Aruna; wander introverted and happy […]

I honestly don’t have a clue what I look like from the outside.  Or- I have clues, from friends (hopefully most honest, but still undeniably subject to mood changes & emotional wellbeing), family (often distorted by… family), men who have been drinking in bars (predictable), random encounters with strangers…  and more recently in my Selfie […]

First of all, a description of the day out there: Phoned my Collingwood rehearsal before 8am and said it looked iffy, then went back to sleep. All of this adds up to Permission. To sleep, which I’ve done.  To stretch the day into a different shape, which I’m doing.  A shape that can contain a […]

We have a poet Laureate in this town of 22,000 people, and have had for at least a decade.  Her job is to lift us into a place where we remember to breathe. Here’s a bit the current PL recently posted on facebook that has stuck in my heart like cupid’s dart: “Someone forgot to […]

I’ve given myself two weeks to answer a list.  On my list are relatively small goals but they are necessarily comprehensive, since the overall aim is to break through a log jam of old unfulfilled ideas, to clear out what is no longer useful or appropriate, and give form to the ones with a vigorous […]

I wake into this morning still wrapped in a cocoon of wonder, pour myself into hot coffee and sunshine. From this computer two lovely pieces of new music emerge, both via my dear friend Kati Gleiser who is some hundreds of miles away but also next to me, as I write.  I listen to Kati’s […]