Public Talk, Oeno Gallery, Prince Edward County, ON - Nov 16, 2019

I grew up a Montreal city kid, who spent summers in Prince Edward County until I was 17. Nature, for me, was and continues to be something to be in awe of, and feared. I've always remained just on the edges, looking in, somewhat perplexed. I can identify poison ivy (don't touch), and a trillium (don't take) and, otherwise nature to me is mostly abstract. But as a painter, abstract is something I can work with.

I moved to Vancouver at age 21 and dipped in around the edges of a very different natural environment than the one we have here in Ontario.  The smells were different, the sounds different, the bugs different. The images hadn't warned me. 

The relationship of painting to nature is a strange one. How does an artist convey the experience of nature in an image? How do you imply the smell of a marsh? The feel of oppressive mid summer heat, or breathing the cool wet air of the rainforest?

And what is all that stuff out there?

A few years ago I went on a mission to identify every tree from my front door in Vancouver to my son's school. Maybe he won't turn out as ignorant as I feel. In this process, I took a first serious look at botanical illustration and saw in each work the desire in the artist to know nature.  To break it down, and decipher it, to catalog it, and to save it. 

As I looked deeper at botanical art, I learned about some of the adventurous naturalists and illustrators who entrenched themselves in the wild for their work.

And I I was surprised to find again and again that they understood. The pioneer/ explorer mission to tame nature, was at the cost of the wild. Already by the mid 19th century, European naturalists where talking about wild nature as an Eden to be discovered before it slipped away, and they were working do catalog it. 

Their work is absolutely beautiful, highly scientific -  and yet says little of the experience of the wild, it doesn't move, it doesn't smell, buzz or bite. However, it is educational, and archival. 

I was left with many questions. 

- What would it look like if we only experienced nature through art? 

- Can we only reconnect with nature by placing ourselves in it? Or is does the opposite work too? Can we place nature inside ourselves  through the art that we make, and connect that way?

Last spring in Vancouver, I exhibited my first series of paintings inspired by historical botanical illustration . Like these here today, they are not botanical paintings, you will learn nothing true about plants. They are impressions of nature through botanical art.  

This new series of paintings are inspired by a botanical book written by  Catherine Parr Traill, published in 1868, and illustrated by her niece. 

Catherine and her sister Susanna Moodie were two sisters who with their husbands, emigrated from Victorian England to settle in the backwoods of Canada, not far from Belleville in the mid 1800's. Susanna was an accomplished writer, Catherine a curious naturalist.  Both sisters produced incredible work despite the very harsh experience of pioneer life. 

I learned of the sisters from my mother Marianne, who has been looking very closely at Susanna's writing, in particular her book Roughing it in the Bush. As a mother’s day gift, I found a very early copy of Roughing It In The Bush from a book seller on Salt Spring Island in BC. 

I was working on the first botanical art paintings when it arrived in the mail. The minute I opened the package it hit me. The chasm between the experience of the bush, and the documentation of the experience. The smell. The book smelled like a 1000 year old tree, turned into a 150 year old book. It smelled like dirt and animal. It smelled like nature. 

I realized that my botanical paintings were not really about nature, but about my relationship to nature, my curiosity. My experience of nature as an outsider. About my hunger to understand nature. To feel at home in nature. My desire to love it, to want to protect it rather than fear it.  

When Oeno Gallery offered me this opportunity to exhibit, I knew exactly what  exhibition I wanted to produce. All of the flowers quoted in this exhibition are flowers described in Catherine Parr Traill's book Canadian Wildflowers. They were chosen from these backwoods of Canada by Catherine Parr Traill who so lyrically described them in her book. 

Catherine's chosen flowers bloom again here, on canvas, transformed by time, through interpretation and imagination. And in the spring, they will again be reborn just beyond your own doorsteps. 

A continuous cycle of reinvention.