13 minute read
ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT
Karen Tamminga-Paton
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I am a painter from the Crowsnest Pass, who has a love for Fernie through the connections I’ve made with dear friends and the creative community here. You should at least know this about me: my outdoor preference is paddling down the Elk River over downhill skiing any day because I cannot bear the chairlift for fear of heights. And no, skinning up the slopes does not make up for this problem.
I taught jr/sr high school art between doing my own studio work and raising three daughters. Students heard me say these often-repeated phrases during my 30 years in the classroom: • Art is a language and not just something to match your couch. You have thoughts that can be expressed through imagery.
This is a great thing.
• It’s simply in us to make marks, whether it’s with sand, or on velvet, or with the end of a charred stick after roasting marshmallows. And it’s in us to love colour and form. We can’t help it, so do it.
• Process is more important than the product. Pay attention to it and you will notice that the more you create, the more elegant your work will become. • Giving permission pretty well summarizes my teaching practice.
Especially during the crazy years of adolescence, to let oneself mess with form, line and colour is a big deal. It is my sincerest hope that students would continue to be makers even as adults, that perhaps some kind of creative practice would give them voice for what’s going on in their inner world and they would find solace through it.
These days, I’m able to give myself to a fulltime painting practice in my little blue studio in old downtown Coleman. The things I repeated to my students are embedded in how I approach my own
work. Painting gives me the space to explore what I think about; it’s my voice. It is an absolute joy for me to make a colour or draw a line. Every time I enter my studio, I give myself permission again to create something. Sometimes it’s a marvel, and sometimes it’s plain cringe worthy. Regardless, I show up nearly every day and keep painting because it’s just a good thing for me to do.
My paintings explore what matters to me: environment, connection, community, faith. I love to play with juxtaposition, throwing unrelated images together as a way to create my own meaning.
To illustrate my process and why I paint the way I do, here is a story. Some years ago, I visited the Butchart Gardens near Victoria. There, I heard how Jenny Butchart taught herself about local botany so she could plant flowers and shrubs on the gutted landscape left behind by her husband’s limestone quarry. She made rope ladders and eased herself down the bare cliffs to plant ferns, stonecrop, and kinnikinnick. From these slow beginnings grew the renown gardens that we enjoy today. When the pandemic hit and I found myself so solitary and uncertain, I remembered this story. It was the seed that inspired my Journey with Flowers series – a boat (my metaphor for journey) carrying flowers (beauty, longing, seeking a better way to live) for every month we’ve lived through COVID. I am currently painting my 24th piece.
Painting makes space to reflect. There’s both lament and joy in this particular series. I grieve for what we’ve done to the earth and wonder about my little grandson’s future. I experience the loneliness and anxiety of our times. But I also celebrate the incredible beauty found in the natural world, the goodness found in community and find some courage to face hard things. All of this as I prepare yet another canvas for a painted boat carrying flowers in undefined space. As meaningful as this series has been, I’ve decided last month was my last one! It’s time to explore some other ideas that have been brewing.
You can see more of Karen’s work on her website tammingapaton.com, on Instagram @tammingapatonart, or in person at the Fernie Arts Co-op and occasionally at H-Squared Gallery.
Every year around earth day I take stock of the environmental impact of my art practice. I’ve always worked hard to minimize my footprint, and my studio is the place I spend the most time so it makes sense for me to create green processes wherever possible. I do use some petrochemicals because the oil-based letterpress inks need a little muscle to get clean and mineral spirits are the only thing up to the task, but at a liter per year that’s not a big impact. I use paper too, but over the years have found options that are 100% recycled fiber for most of my print work. Most days I don’t even turn the lights on in the studio because the big windows provide enough light.
This year I’m wondering what more I can do. All of these things feel like such small actions in the face of a global climate crisis which, at the time of writing, is being overshadowed by a different human-made crisis in the Ukraine. As I putter around in my studio recycling off-cuts and paper ends I’ve been getting more and more angry at us—at humanity. What will it take to make real change? What are the instincts that propel us towards our own destruction? We are smart, why is it so hard to overcome these obstacles? Why can’t we all just get along?
When we first moved to Fernie and opened up our little gallery downtown, I got to talk with a lot of visitors and CaliFernians. Daily a customer would say something like, “You’re so lucky to live here!” and I would smile and agree. But deep down it bugged me that people think it has anything to do with luck. Our family made sacrifices. We pared down our expectations. We simplified our lives and worked our tails off. We bet on this town, and we are grateful that that bet continues to support our lives here. Along the way we have learned about adjusting the expectations of what we want—and more importantly what we need—to survive. We have had to let go of this idea that more is better and letting go has allowed us to live a reasonably content life in a relatively affluent town. It’s not that having less has made us happier, it’s that the process of understanding what we truly need to survive has allowed us to step off the nextthing-hamster-wheel and be more grateful for what we have now. We have a long way to go on our journey, but I like where we are going. It seems like the idea of more is built into humans—a vestige of our hunter-gather days where our actual lives were at stake if we didn’t find enough food before winter. As human knowledge and ingenuity have grown, we’ve (more or less) shed those immediate concerns and added new kinds of things to the list of ‘needs’ in our survival list. Being honest though, most of them are just wants in disguise. Do I need a new bike this year, or just want one? Do I need that fancy new easel or the hand-made guitar? It sure does feel like it sometimes, but I keep coming back to this idea of enough. I have enough. I need very little. I want a lot.
When I look at the crisis humanity is facing, I realize that the underlying issue is our desire for more. More things, more trips, more vehicles, more screens, more rooms, more toys, more land, more countries, more power, more me, less us. When John D. Rockefeller was asked how much money it took to make a person happy, he famously replied, “just one more
Enough is Enough
by MICHAEL HEPHER
Notes To Self by Myrna Keliher Hand-set type & ink on cardstock, Expedition Press • Kingston, WA., expeditionpress.com
dollar.” That ‘one more’ attitude is coded in our DNA and steeped in our culture, but we need to curb that hunger if we want to effect real change. That means altering what success means to us. We could promote stability and contentment, rather than growth. We can look at our innate desire to want more, acknowledge it, and learn to be satisfied with enough.
As those existential questions simmer in my being, I need something to quench them so I can continue to move forward with some hope. A friend of mine once said, “If you want change, draw a circle on the ground, plant your feet in the circle, and work on changing everyone inside it.” Here at ground level all I have are the small actions, so I continue to stand inside my circle and work on changes to myself. The true impact will be brought not by sorting the recycling, or walking downtown, but by acknowledging that those small choices are part of my growing understanding that I do indeed have enough—and enough is enough.
The purpose of the Communities of Interest Advisory Initiative is to foster dialogue and communication between the four coal operations and community representatives within their area of influence.
Green Shirt Day
April 6, 2022 marks the fourth year since the Humboldt Broncos bus crash that took 16 lives. Victim Logan Boulet, who succumbed to his injuries, saved six lives by donating his organs as prior to the accident he had expressed his wishes to his family to be an organ donor. Find out about the Logan Boulet Effect at greenshirtday.ca/about/ and consider registering.
www.evcnpvoice.com
Snapshots: A glimpse into the remarkable stories of people and places in the Columbia Basin.
April is Earth Month
This earth month, you’re encouraged to get out and explore outdoor recreation and trails across the region. Let us know what you are doing to honour earth month! #sustainablebasin
The Great Trail and the Grunt, Sparwood
Montane Loop Trail, Fernie
Lunch Loop, Sparwood
Follow the Trust on Instagram and Facebook @columbiabasintrust for your chance to win an e-bike this April!
Valued up to $3000 Sparwood Skatepark, Sparwood
Honouring Earth Month!
Basin residents care deeply about the environment and the impacts of climate change. Recognizing that changes in environmental conditions affect all facets of life, the Trust applies climate resilience considerations in it’s work across the Basin.
ourtrust.org/strategicpriority
For the Love of the Oceans
by Sadie and Cy Rosgen
My son Cypress has been creating something out of nothing for some time now.
As he inched closer and closer to Grade 3, he was the most excited about participating in the annual science fair. For the past few years, he’d venture into the recycling bin and unearth all of the necessary ingredients for a train, plane or automobile! Now, finally, he could apply his boredom busting skills in creating a spectacular, functional model that was going to wow both his peers and teachers alike. When given the theme, environmental issues, he was quick to look to our planet’s oceans. As we sifted through photos of rip curls brimming with garbage, aquatic animals maimed by rubbish, and full on islands of waste, he began dreaming up a contraption to help.
Together, we came up with a series of Haiku poems that expressed our collective concern, inspired by an important project.
For the Love of the Oceans: Four Haiku Poems in Observation
by Sadie and Cy Rosgen
Water sustains life Feel it move through your body Protect this system
Aluminum blob Cans travel across the world No refund for them
Prolific debris Filth from all over the globe Picking up the mess
Pollution is bad What is happening to our home? Animals can die
Dune
by ANDREW VALLANCE
Dune, also known as the Dune Chronicles, is a science fiction media franchise that originated with the 1965 novel by Frank Herbert. The seed for the novel was planted when Herbert was assigned to write a magazine article about the sand dunes in the Oregon Dunes, located near Florence, Oregon. He began his research in 1959 and took six years to complete a book that was much longer than other commercial science fiction of the time and was rejected by twenty book publishers.
Finally in 1965 it was published by the Chilton Book Company, which mainly published auto-repair manuals, and it was soon a critical success. It was not an immediate commercial success, however, even though it earned more than most science fiction novels of the time, and Herbert was not able to take up full-time fiction writing until 1972.
The novel won the inaugural Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1965 and shared the 1966 Hugo Award, and was later adapted into a 1984 film, a 2000 television miniseries, and a 2021 film. Herbert wrote five sequels, the first two of which were presented as a miniseries called Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune in 2003. Dune has also inspired some traditional games and a series of video games. Since 2009 the names of planets from the Dune novels have been adopted for the real-world nomenclature of geological features on Saturn’s moon, Titan.
Frank Herbert died in 1986. Beginning in 1999 his son Brian Herbert and science fiction author Kevin J. Anderson published a number of prequel novels, as well as two sequels that complete the original Dune series (Hunters of Dune in 2006 and Sandworms of Dune in 2007). They were partially based on Frank Herbert’s notes that were discovered a decade after his death. The novel follows Paul Atreides, Scion of House Atreides, as he battles his archrival, House Harkonnen, for control of the planet Arakis, which is the only source of spice, the substance which in the Dune universe fuels space flight and, by extension, interstellar trade. The story is essentially an allegory for geo-political struggles in the middle east during the Cold War, with Paul and House Atreides representing the U.S.A. and the Harkonnens standing in for the Soviet Union.
Dune’s 1984 big screen adaptation was put out by Universal, desperately trying to cash in on Star Wars mania post Return of the Jedi. The film was directed by David Lynch, an art house director with no real interest in science fiction. The movie was confusing with peculiar over the top performances and very little connection to the original source material. It bombed at the box office.
Thankfully, in 2021 director Denis Villeneuve brought us a worthy adaptation of Herbert’s classic. This film if excellent. It is beautifully shot, with a gorgeous score and a great performance by Timothy Chalamet as Paul and wonderful supporting turns from Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Zendaya, Jason Momoa and Rebecca Ferguson. Stellan Skarsgard and Dave Batista are also impressive as the evil Baron Harkonnen and his sadistic authoritarian son respectfully.
This movie is absolutely worth seeing. I am looking forward to its sequel, coming in 2023.