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| Discovering a new way of looking at, and creating, landscape. |
As summer slides into autumn, I’m bidding a
reluctant farewell to 2016’s Summer of Art.
Long-time friends as well as my
long-suffering husband are familiar with my love-hate relationship with painting:
I want to do it but I’m terrible at it. So when I announced I’d signed up for twelve
weeks of classes at the ArtQuarters studio in Pugwash, my husband looked at me
like I’d dyed my hair purple. Having witnessed my painting meltdowns in the
past, I suspect he thought I was wasting my money.
Those art classes were money well-spent and
provided the bonus of supporting retired art teacher Louise Cloutier’s
long-time dream of opening an art studio. Seriously, if Louise could teach art
to high school students for thirty years, she could teach me for one summer.
What made the classes unique were Louise’s
mini lessons in art history. By showing us how art has been created since humans
first began drawing in cave walls, and providing examples of the works of
masters like Rembrandt, Matisse and Picasso, we gained an appreciation for the
evolution of technique.
If you’d known this, you wouldn’t have been
surprised when you looked in the windows and spied us dipping lengths of white
string into glue and laying them on thin squares of wood boards or ripping
painted paper and gluing them to pieces of cardboard.
But I was surprised when I took that
particular creation to church on Sunday to share my image of a person praying
in a garden, depicted in ripped paper, and a member of the congregation joined
our classes the next day. I never thought I’d inspire someone with my artwork.
This is the importance of lifelong learning,
of saying “Yes” to new experiences. Not only do you learn a new skill, you also
learn about yourself. You may say “I can’t draw” but Louise Cloutier is adamant
anyone can create art because art isn’t limited to drawing or painting.
For me, that was the value of an entire
summer creating art: Realizing I don’t have to paint in order to be creative.
Even when the class in the dreaded landscape painting arrived and was, as
expected, totally frustrating, I didn’t have a meltdown. I knew it was only one
class so doing landscapes was not my only art experience.
In fact, it was very next week that actually
reclaimed the dreaded landscape for me. Using Group of Seven paintings as
inspiration, we created landscape collages using pieces of colourful material
like men’s shirts and upholstery.
As I was gluing those scraps of fabric into
a likeness of a Tom Thompon painting, I realized these classes were teaching me
about more than art; they were teaching me about myself. Through this Summer of
Art, I learned I am not a details person, preferring broad strokes to specific
ones; and I like creating with my hands using texture and fabric, scissors and glue.
“We need to slow our looking in order to
see,” Louise told us early on. Turns out, we also need to slow our looking in
order to see ourselves, as well.
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| The Monday night class with our final projects. Louise Cloutier is on the left. |
Thanks, Sara. You truly grasped that fundamental of art: teaching us about self. And that creativity is more than painting and drawing. Seeing with that other eye is what I find so fascinating about Louise's methods. I think good teachers know how to do that in every subject.
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