One Step Closer to Knowing: Artist's Statement

One Step Closer to Knowing

Artist's Statement

Almost forty years ago in the spring of 1978, I was on my first trip to New York City as a young student. While visiting the Museum of Modern Art, I encountered the painting Christina’s World by American painter Andrew Wyeth. Painted in 1948, it depicted what seemed to be a young girl in a faded pink dress, lying in a field looking towards a farmhouse on the crest of a hill.

I distinctly remember this as my first impression of the painting. Seeing it again I realized to my disdain and amazement that the figure actually had distorted hands and the skin on bone arms of a much older woman. I had neglected to actually see the work.

This painting taught me my responsibility as the viewer to focus my visual observation, to find the various elements and meanings presented by the artist within the work before me.The woman depicted in the painting was Christina Olsen. She had a form of MS that debilitated her movement to the point she had to crawl wherever she went.

It is thought that the muted palette and barren landscape of Wyeth’s paintings at that time were part of an outward expression of his inner grief over the loss of his father. He would continue to paint more than 300 works of Christina, her brother and their farm in Cushing, Maine over the next 30 years.

In August of 2016 we took a trip to see the house, now a National Historic Site. At the Olsen house, we experienced the architectural beauty and gripping stories and left with a profound sense of the physical and metaphoric importance of that place.One of our travelling companions, a writer, was sensing the same range of emotions. Through her written words, and my visual images, we have both begun to deal with the psychological impact of our visit and the stage of our lives in which we now find ourselves.

I have used the framework of the gaze in and from that Colonial house to be a starting point to think about my own life, what has passed, the loss of youthfulness and how we got here from there. We all search for a place that we call home. We want to understand it better, to be able to reflect and savour past experiences, to better understand where we are today in order to find our way back home.

I once heard Canadian painter/printmaker John Hartman claim-

“I believe we all have a home landscape, a place from childhood, whose light, space and scale are the benchmark for all other landscapes. We all carry our home landscapes around inside us.

I am attempting to find this “home landscape” , this place where clarity and rest can be found. This new body of work has its roots in the Olsen house experience but extends beyond a singular place. These images contain the home landscape of my experience found in space and time around the Bay of Fundy in my home province of New Brunswick.

I completed a series of thirteen works. I corresponded with our travelling companion, writer Wendy Jones, who created a series of written texts that were printed as letterpress broadsides to accompany the images.These broadsides were printed on photopolymer plates, produced by Box Car Press, a letterpress company from New Jersey. I printed these letterpress plates on a Vandercook Letter Press at Mount Allison University.

This completed collaboration could be presented in a gallery exhibition with the broadsides hung alongside the prints.I am interested in the discourse of collaboration within my work and the printed word has piqued my interest in combination with these images.