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What about your paintings?

Well, I don't paint any more.

No. Why don't you?

I make electric signs.

[Laughs] What's that?

Like "Labatt's?"

[Laughter]

A bit like that. I don't make them. The factory makes them. I borrow the captions. One big one was 15 feet long. I also made a book. And later I made a few with neon around the edges. The writing was routered into plastic or sandblasted into glass. With neon tubes around the edges the letters pick up the coloured light.

And you do all that?

No, I get factories to do it for me. You didn't sign them.

Well, the only thing that you engrave is what is going to be picked up and if I paint on the front plate too then the light picks up that image. So if I were just to outline this and then put the second plate on the back with the colours the colour wouldn't illuminate. If I chose to highlight anything on the front, I could pick the colours and have them glow.

Uhm hm.

Well, I remember one other picture that was in the parlor in a nice frame. And it was kind of flowers--kind of as corsage or something made out of different colours of hair. And the hair was from the heads of members of the family.

[Laughter] It doesn't sound very good to me. However, now, they make these moose hair pictures that are fantastic. Have you seen any of that?

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MOTIVATION

But I was wondering why people wanted to copy this. You'd have to second guess Mary's reasons why she wanted ...

Why she wanted what?

A copy of it.

Why would you get Rosie to make this?

Because I wanted a copy of it because it was in the frame that held the picture of my grandmother and grandfather to begin with. It was an old fashioned frame--an antique frame that it was in.

This frame.

Yeah. And because it hung in Grandma's parlor when we lived with Grandma. And that was the only picture in the whole parlor that was nice, that I enjoyed.

Oh. And you also wanted to preserve this frame but didn't want to hang the cracked and broken old painting in it.

Yeah, well, of course I wanted to preserve the frame. And of course if I had a better picture to put in the frame I would put it in.

Then here's the one you made.

Yeah, The colours are all darker.

What were you thinking when you decided to copy Rosie's?

What was I thinking?

Yeah.

Well, I just wanted to paint. I just wanted to paint. That's all. It was something to paint.

I don't know her reason.

You know I guess it's going to be very hard to ask people about their reasons because you might not be fully aware of what your reasons are. Certainly one of the interesting things is that there's no concern whatsoever for having what is known in the art world as an "original". The idea of an original.

No, except maybe for the first one--do you think-- because they saw...

Yes,

But even then, we don't know how original that was. Maybe he had a pattern or something.

But I can't believe I just said that because the whole point of my copying someone's work was to say that every manifestation, every remake of it, is an original.

I suppose you know life in the prairies in those days that there wasn't really much beauty in life. And everything existed for a practical reason.

That's right.

Although there was some chinaware and furniture that was brought from back East. There was only so much that they could bring. Relatives down East sent them a few things now and then.

Yeah and you could buy things through Eaton's catalogue and so on. But really, I don't know I'm just speculating, but I guess it was a very masculine society in that everything was done for quite pragmatic reasons.

Yesss.

It was the role of the women to make life as aesthetically pleasing as they could but I don't think they had much to work with.

No and they were too busy on the farm and so on.

Well, I would think that it would be interesting to ask people who wanted the works and even the people who did the work what their motivation was. It would seem to me to be largely related to the subject, the image but I don't know. I'd be interested to know why they wanted to.

That came out in some of the interviews. It was partly the subject. In my Mom's case she says it was the only nice picture they had. With the other people it seemed as if it was because they'd grown up with it. That seemed to come up a number of times.

Oh, yes, that's a very interesting reason. I like that reason.

So, yours is going to be hung and you're going to be a famous artist. So you can quit all those jobs and go on painting.

I was going to say, "Do you want me to have it framed properly before it goes?'

We never did consider it that sort of a work of art though.

It's the idea that the painters are doing what they love to do.

Yeah.

It has to do with history. It has to do with your love of paint. It has to do with family relationships and memories.

It's very interesting to think about what makes a person make a copy of a painting. Ah, rather than working from life. It's such a restricted situation.

Yes, that's interesting. But these may have been more of a sentiment--or a nostalgia that motivated the making.

That's right.

Documentation without the camera?

Yyy...ah yes, because this painting was not in her possession. It was as if she wanted a picture for herself. Is that what you mean?

Well, I think maybe this was an exercise too because she was taking up painting. She'd done watercolor painting earlier in life but probably not much oil painting. I expect she wanted to set herself up with an exercise because she already had her copy. So why would she want another one? Unless it was just ..

It may very well have been an exercise with the paint.

Or else it might have been to have one in each room.

Could be.

Yes. Each of these will be a brand new copy. See the motives for copying in an earlier time are very different from my motives. The idea for this show is partly that people have different reasons for doing things.

I heard different viewpoints on people's motivations for copying this one. I was wondering specifically what did you feel? What were your reasons? I think you were the first one to have a copy made of this.

I think Mary had a copy made. I think Dee painted a copy of it before I had a copy made. I'm not sure. When Dee made the copy she had that river running downhill.

I wonder where that one is?

Nobody seems to remember.

I remember it hanging in Carol's kitchen there for quite awhile.

Alice Anderson definitely had signed the other two that came from Mary's. None of the ones shown at the reunion had the water going straight down the hill. So that one must be missing.

Well, it wasn't going straight down hill but it was going down hill.

Maybe it was destroyed because it was considered a poor copy.

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