LANDSCAPE STORIES

I actually had an experience of landscape similar to this one that I produced in Saskatchewan.

Really?

Yeah, my grandfather had done a pen and ink drawing of Dover Castle. And then I did a piece on it as homage to him. When I went to England I did a pen and ink drawing of Dover Castle but from a little bit closer along the road.

As a take-off from what your grandfather did.

Yeah, I did a whole installation with some of his works.

Of your grandfather's. Well, this is my Mom's copy of a landscape painting here. She saw the original being painted at a Minburn Sports Day--the man sitting there... and..

He wasn't sitting. He was standing.

Oh, was he? That wasn't mentioned before.

He had his painting on an easel.

Oh, O.K. He stood up for two or three hours?

I suppose, I don't know.

Would you like to have a chair now?

Maybe later, right now the wall is supporting me.

You heard Steve say that he did a study of his grandfather's pen and ink drawing.

Yeah.

It was one he had done of Dover Castle when he was a young man in Britain. And ah, I traveled there when I was the same age as he was when he did the drawing. I did another one that was a little closer along the road.

My show dealt with an homage to my grandfather and also ah, examining the changes in masculinity. I had great respect for my grandfather. It ends up highlighting the differences over generations.

My grandfather and I had been hoping to go back to England together. He had his cataracts taken care of and was about to start painting again when he retired. He kind of lost it for awhile and wasn't able to work or anything.

Yeah.

And ah, you know I really wanted to do something to remember him.

You didn't really do a copy from his. You copied his activity.

And his technique.

So that was partly nostalgic and partly an homage and partly to connect.

And about continuity and changes in that period as well.

Today's Sept. what?

Twentieth.

Was there a lot of water?

Well after having a trip to Lethbridge and organizing to entertain family. I got here just after the spill. I rushed to get ready for my talk and just as I was ready to step up there, a little lady came up to me and said, "Are you Vera Gartley?" I said, "Yes." She said, "Did you go to school in Rochester?". I said, "Yes." And she said, "I was your teacher."

Ohhhh.

She read about the landscape show in the paper. I was so touched I could hardly start my lecture. I was choked up for a moment. When I looked around my cousin had come. And ah, she stayed through my talk. They brought her a chair.

Ohhh, wow! That's so excellent! I wish I was here.

I'm collecting all kinds of conversations and some of them are stories about ah, like yours--they're anonymous clips on display in a binder.

Oh, well, I haven't gone down yet to see the show. When does it open?

The 20th

O.K.

So my grandmother, Thelma, worked with Anora Brown and they traveled around the southern parts of the province doing landscapes together--in watercolour and in oil but Anora Brown worked mostly in the watercolour and prints. Anyway my grandmother did a painting of two trees in Waterton that were very windblown and looked like the character of Waterton. And everyone in the clan, all the distant relatives loved it so much that she agreed to make one for all the different families. So, there's a picture of two trees, the same colours of oranges and blues in each one, the same forms, as close to being a reproduction as possible in just about every family member's house--that is of her own people.

Oh isn't that amazing.

That is they're going down through the generations to see who gets the picture of the two trees.

Oh, really.

I did have an exhibition finally of her work at the Bowman Art Centre before she died.

Ohhh.

And that original, I mean the one that she kept for herself was in the exhibit. We literally could have had a show of all of them.

So you didn't. They're all scattered around.

They're all scattered around, yeah.

It would be interesting to have a little booklet..

Oh, wouldn't it.

In the Resource room with my show, showing snap shots, you know.

Of what that picture looked like.

Yeah, of the series--well, everyone's copy. Is it possible to get everyone's copy? Did she copy them off the original or did she go back to the site?

I think she probably did a couple from the site and then did the rest from her studio at home. She had a bedroom converted into a studio and she did a lot of on site sketching. And then would come back to the studio and formalize it--you know into a painting.

Yes.

She was valued as an artist in the family but the work wasn't recognized as being valuable.

Yes.

Of course it was easy. It was something she did. One didn't really pay for art. I mean she may have gotten, you know, baking goods or whatever traded for it.

Oh that's interesting.

I don't know what they did for her in return. But there was an assumption that if you liked it, it was more the honor of someone liking it that you did it again.

[Laughter] Well, that's a different copying situation than the one that I have set up. It's lovely. I was wondering if their motivations were nostalgic. Because they didn't grow up with that painting.

The family members? Well, they all grew up with the site though, because my people are all from Southern Alberta.

I see.

So they, holidayed all the time in Waterton and they lived down there in the mountains. So the site that she painted they all knew well. They picnicked around it. So it was... and so when she actually was doing the paintings, they were really poor. So for a lot of them that painting would be the only painting they would have. That was their art piece.

That's very interesting. So parallel to the one that I found in my family. When I asked my mother about ah, the motivation or the memory of it she would always answer, "It was the only nice thing in the parlor."

Uh, huh. Yeah, it was valued because it was for nostalgic reasons because it was a way of capturing the essence of the location that they all knew so well but they didn't place a monetary value on it. They didn't see that as being... my grandmother, I don't think she ever sold a piece of art.

Yes.

Yeah, I don't think any family member ever paid her for the materials or time. As I say she was paid in the honor of them liking it and wanting one.

Yes.

Oh, Thelma, we love that! We'd love to have one of those. Her payment would be them liking it.

Oh, that's wonderful!

The original surfaced again around 1970 and they passed it around and got amateurs to make copies.

Why did they copy it?

Because they grew up with it. It was nostalgia, that's all. They wanted the ownership of the image and they wanted to be reminded.

Are these all from exactly the same image?

Yes, they're all from that one. The discussion goes on. And these are people from small communities, isolated from the art world.

Yeah.

Where is the scene?

We don't know.

It's somewhere near Banff.

You think so?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I've seen it.

Well...

Yeah, it's...

It's commonly painted. The distinction is that tree coming out.

Is that right?

Yeah. I swear.

I think you're right. It's probably from Banff.

Well, you know what came from my uncle was that this is Lake Superior. He said his mother, my grandmother, told him that. They were homesteaders here from Ontario you know.

I think it's from Bow Falls up by the Banff golf course.

Do you?

And this is the rapids that come down from the falls.

Really?

And out here is where the water settles down.

Yeah.

Into a river.

It looks like the Bow River when you first get into the Foothills.

I have a picture of John hanging off the cliff with that in the background.

Really?

I swear.

Yeah, this is mountainous. They don't have hills like those in Ontario.

No. Well...

Look at the rapid water coming down from the falls into the flat.
We don't know for sure whether the man that painted this did it from memory or what. My Mom was only ten years old so maybe this isn't even that painting that she saw being painted.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But that doesn't matter in relation to this project.

I don't know very much about Flexy. But there are people who do. Nancy Tousley was one of the curators of a show that was at the McMichael Collection. She did some research for that. She put some Gladys Johnson's in and some Flexys.

All I know is that his name is Levine Flexhaugh. Everyone called him Flexy and he signed his paintings sometimes.

I see.

I don't know much about him other than a story that I heard from Cal, the street guy--you know the guy with the green hair and the earrings and all the bags of stuff that he carries around. Anyway, he started telling me about this guy named, Flexy. And this was down in Waterton.

Yeah.

Anyway, this was about 1949 or '50. He said that he was down there and Flexhaugh hired him to paint the under parts of his paintings.

Ohhh.

So he just had to get a brush and maybe paint the blue and the white or something like that. And anyway, after some time, Cal said, "Does one of those paintings of yours have a moose in it and some mountains?" And I said, "Yes," and he said they were probably done in '49 or '50 down in Waterton. [Laughs] Of course Flexy's painting all had moose and mountains in them.

Yeah. Well, I heard it was a deer and a lake or something.

Yeah.

Well, there was an interesting little story from my opening. (Everyone tells me landscape stories.) She said she had a painting of a scene in Saskatchewan done by a man that paints the same scene over and over again. She was telling it as a romantic story. And ah, then somehow we got on to the story of Flexy .

Uhm, hm.

And they said he does paint the same thing over and over again and that David Thauberger owns a lot of them. And they always have a deer and a lake and a cabin in them. She said, "Say, that's what's in my painting!"

Really.

She said, "When I go home I'm going to look at the name on it."

Well.

And so that was my introduction to Flexy.

I've got seven or eight of them.

Oh, you have. Are they all of the same scene?

No. Well, they're all slightly different but they're all pretty much of the same scene.

So did he just sit at that one lake?

Oh, I don't think so. It's a made up thing.

I see.

It's all composition. So dead centre there's a mountain in the background. So he probably took blue. He had blue at the top and the blue faded to white. And then and there would be white gradated to blue in the lake.

Yeah.

So what he would do then was just lay... He was a process painter. He would lay things down and the front was the last thing he put down. So first the sky, and then the colour of the water, and then he put a mountain down, and then he put trees in front of that. He just built from the back to the front.

I see. Very interesting.

Well, that should be enough.

[Uproarious laughter]

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