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THE ORIGINAL PAINTING

There is no signature on there. Where did the picture come from in the first place? Does anybody know?

Yeah, it came from the Minburn Sports Day. Mom says she watched the man painting it.

Oh.

You know they are like buskers only they are painters.

Yeah.

She doesn't know how it got into Grandma Park's house. It either was gifted to them or they bought it at the Sports Day from the man.

Maybe.

No signature.

Well, he's just out there dashing them off, to make a living I guess. So they moved into Great Grandma's house to take care of her when Grandpa Park died. When my grandpa sold all his land and moved to Vegreville they took that picture with them.

Oh, I believe so. Yeah.

By then the cardboard was so brittle it just broke when Uncle David's ball bounced against it.

So, I wondered if they liked something different from the landscape they were used to seeing or you wondered even if this reminded them of back home.

Yeah. These low hills. It's not really an Ontario landscape either - maybe a Northern Ontario landscape.

Yeah. We wondered about Ontario. But you know what? After talking awhile he said, "It's Lake Superior."

Oh, that could be.

I said, "Oh, who told you that?" and he said, "Mama.'"

Oh, okay.

But I don't think this is Lake Superior. Do you think it is with those rapids there?

Well it could be a river flowing into Lake Superior

I guess it could.

Yeah. I think it could that because it does have those lower mountains there.

Does lake Superior have these? I've driven over the North of it but I've forgotten. I didn't see any hills that are pretty high. That could be it.

Well I haven't been there in over thirty years either. Yeah, I think they have low sort of Laurentians. They're fairly high rocky hills.

Yeah. So maybe that's why she treasured it then. Maybe they had been to Lake Superior a few of times. So that makes me wonder if it could have been sent to them from somebody down there. Then maybe it was an entirely different painting that my mom saw being painted at the sports day.

Yeah. Of course some painters don't like the paint sinking in either.

Yeah. So we were wondering about this area here. It seems totally smoggy.

Yeah. It was almost as if he didn't finish. It definitely looks unfinished.

Well this edge would be understandable because he knew it would be covered by a frame but...

But on this side he's put detail here.

Yeah

Over here it isn't even a colour that relates to anything else.

Yeah.

Nothing relates to it.

And there's a bit of gold here. Somebody painted the frame and a bit of it got on the surface of the painting.

I wonder if Mom painted that while the picture was in the frame.

Well there's a bit of a smudge here where one of the copiers smudged a bit.

Yeah.

A different kind of smudge.

One of the copiers has done a few smudges on it.

The original needs cleaning

Oh, how could you clean that? It's so...

Well,

So broken up

Someone would know how to do it.

Think so?

I don't know if you could get rid of the cracks but you could make it cleaner.

This original copy made in 1918 was from ah, ...

From Nature. Or was it from--just out of his head or was it ah, a kind of standard landscape image that he was working from. I'm thinking of mall painters that have a kind of standardized series of landscapes that they work from.

Well, these questions came up in our discussions and I don't think it was clearly answered.

Right.

I was wondering if the man that painted this picture at the Sports Grounds in 1918 had some standardized version that he used to mass produce this landscape. Or did he use a photo?

It's not...It's just painted from memory as far as I can recall. He just had that picture in his mind and painted it.

Oh. And he had other paintings there as well?

No.

Just this one.

No. He just painted that one. Well, it took him two or three hours to do that.

She said she watched hIm paint it. She would have been about ten years old then --about 1918

1918

She was ten then.

Yeah, she would have been ten.

But somehow the painting ended up in your grandpa and grandma's house--my great grandparents' house. And then Grandma and Grandpa, your parents got it. It's in their parlor that the younger ones remember it.

Yeah.

Somehow Mom ended up with the original after Grandma passed away. She had a copy made and began passing around the original.

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