Taking the bog's temperature. Don't worry - it's not sick

Strange things happen in bogs, especially in northern Europe where all kinds of rituals and magical rites went on during the Iron Age. I just wrote about visiting a bog, or muskeg, just near Waskesiu Lake in northern Saskatchewan. Read it here. As far as I know, no rites or sacrificial offerings have ever been made in a northern Saskatchewan bog, but there is still some of that mysterious otherwordly atmosphere. And while the 2-km loop Boundary Bog Trail near Waskesiu is a popular well-marked hike, there are many other less-explored bogs up there in the gorgeous boreal forest. Along with bears, coyotes, cougars and timber wolves, of course.

Let's walk!

As a child I spent summers at nearby Emma Lake, about 30 miles away from Waskesiu, and my sisters and I used to make regular forays into a dark mossy area we called the Enchanted Forest. There are no neat trails or paths there at all, you just enter this crazy forest that’s coated in sphagnum moss and sink up to your ankles in the stuff and know that you’re in another world. And because there are no signs or markers and it’s not on any maps, there’s no danger of crowds or tourists. I can truly say that I have never ever seen a tourist in the Enchanted Forest.

It can, however, be dangerously confusing. One summer John Cage got lost in there. Yes, I said JOHN CAGE. The famous New York composer. What was he doing up there, you ask? He was there at the Emma Lake Artists Workshop, a rustic art camp that drew a number of famous New York artists and critics like Clement Greenberg and Kenneth Noland and even Frank Stella. (Now it’s called the Kenderdine Campus but it still has artists’ workshops.)

I have never quite figured why John Cage, who is obviously a composer rather than, like, a painting artist was at Emma Lake but there he was. And then he was gone. Lost in the muskeg. Handily he happened to be a mushroom expert so he gathered wild mushrooms to eat while he waited to be saved. It didn’t take too long for someone to find him. I thought he was out all night, but my mom says she thought he was found in the evening. When he did finally get back to the art camp he cooked up the mushrooms he’d gathered and served them to the other artists, my mother, Dorothy Knowles, included.

If you go into the woods today ...

Maybe while he was lost in the forest he was thinking a lot about art and nature because while he was serving the mushrooms he stopped in front of my mom, a landscape painter. “Did you paint those beautiful paintings in the studio?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said and ate her mushrooms, feeling very pleased. You might, in fact, even say it was music to her ears.

Note: There is some good information and pictures of artists during the 60′s in their studios at Emma Lake (including a couple of my mom) on the Art Gallery of Prince Albert website.

It would have been pretty embarrassing to go to Paris and not go to the Louvre, especially when our apartment is right across the street from the gargantuan museum. Our balcony overlooks the east end of it and we’ve spent a lot of time watching other people go in, come out, and mill around. Not to belabour the point, but this is a pretty sensational location. Except of course, after 1 p.m. during a heat wave when this lovely un-airconditioned apartment begins to feel like the inside of a hair dryer, and it’s time to stop looking at the museum from the balcony and actually go inside.

Paris is hot! hot! hot!

I tried to get in using my press card instead of buying a ticket. I’d used it successfully at the Musee D’Orsay on Thursday, and I’ve used it before at the Louvre, though I knew that they liked to give you a hard time. Perseverance, I told myself, is key.

“Non, non, non, non, non,” said the woman at the ticket counter, looking at me as if I was gripping a dead rat between my teeth (which I wasn’t).

“Why not?”

“It’s not an International Press Card.”

“We don’t have those in Canada.”

“Non, non, non.”

I went to the information desk. “I’d like to use my press card to get in,” I said. “I have a TMAC card and an SATW card.”

“Okay,” says the man. “Go and show it at the entrance.”

I go to the entrance of the Denton wing. “Non, sorry. International Press Cards only,” says the woman.

“But they told me it was okay at the information desk.”

She sends me back to the info desk, where they look at my card for awhile, call someone then send me up to the Sully wing and tell me to ask for the manager. I wait a long time for the manager. He looks at my card.

“You need an International Press Card.”

“Read this!” I say, pointing to my Society of American Travel Writers card. “It says Canada, USA and Mexico – that’s international.”

“No it’s not, it doesn’t say Europe.”

“I don’t write in Europe,” I point out, not that I write in Mexico either, but why quibble?

“I really would like to help you,” he said. “But I can’t.”

“Monsieur,” I say, not even getting mad, because by now I’ve met half the staff at the Louvre and have enjoyed seeing how far I could go in my quest to persevere. “I have waited in the ticket line, at the entrance to the Denon wing, at Information twice and now, you are saying I must go back and start again? Plus I must pay?”

He shrugs helplessly. He really did want to help – and though it would have been more helpful if he’d just shunted me through the entrance – he said, “I can at least take you to the front of the line so you can buy a ticket.”

“Deal,” I said.

“It’s really a problem, this press card business,” he said as we took the escalators down.

“For me, not you,” I said.

“No, for us too,” he replied, and I suppose since I had used up quite a bit of staff time, and had given him the unpleasant task of saying no when he would have preferred to say yes, it was indeed a problem for the both of us.

Finally an hour later I am inside the Denon wing and find that Mark has rented a headphone set. Let me just say right now that there is no way that one person in a pair can rent a headset and the other go without. The one without – that would be me – must stand around tapping their feet while the other listens to entertaining stories about the masterpiece you are staring at blankly.

“Why didn’t you rent me one?” I whined.

“I didn’t think you’d want one.”

Mark, bless his heart, thinks I know everything about art and would never stoop to such a basic educational device as a headset. (He knows better now). I may know a Rembrant from a Da Vinci and I can spot a Uccello a mile away (I love Uccello, he paints velvety horses in battle and uses perfect perspective at a time when perspective was still a fairly new innovation in art) but I do not know all 35,000 paintings in the Louvre.

So, if our relationship was to last, I had to go out – out!- and wait in another line to get a headset and then another line to get back into the Denon wing. My day at the Louvre was quickly losing its lustre. Mark, who had been lurking around in the sculpture room waiting for me was faring no better than I.

“What do you want to do?” he asked, when I finally made it back with my headset.

“I would just like to look at some paintings!”

So that’s what we did. I loved the headset, which told great info about the paintings, and I loved it even more when it was interesting information I could listen to from the comfort of a padded bench in front of the painting because my legs were already tired from all the pre-entrance lineups. Thus, I now know more about Cimabue that I ever hoped to - since I listened to all the information about him twice.

Mark fell in love with the war room (what else?) and went back and forth from the Géricault Raft of the Medusa and Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People in great excitement. Me? I got to see Paolo Uccello’s Battle of San Romano, a Giotto, and Saint Sebastien getting shot up with arrows by Mantegna. What could be better? And of course we found room 29 with Mona Lisa and an endless swelling of crowds.

Mona who?

Oh, and then I’m looking at Tintoretto’s sketch for Paradise when I look over and see some chirpy American girl trying to pick Mark up!

“Ooh, look, I just took your photograph in front of that painting,” she said.

By the time I got over there, she was gone.

‘That woman just tried to pick you up!”

“Is that what she was doing? I thought she was trying to sell me a photo,” he said.

Can we sit down now?

Then we had a lunch break on an picturesque stone terrace overlooking the Pyramid entrance and met a couple from New York on their 25th anniversary. I should have stopped there, but it’s hard not to keep going at the Louvre. There is always one more masterpiece to seek out, so even though my feet were aching, we headed to the Sully wing to see the Vermeers.

Go soak your feet!

So, like most people I left the Louvre happy but with glazed eyes, burning thighs and hot sweaty feet only to go out into the sun and see that the crowd of art lovers have discovered the perfect reviving post-museum activity – soaking their feet in the fountain. What else could I do but join in? When in Rome, I mean Paris, do as the tourists do …. and above all, persevere.

Not just the prairies

It started with the talk she had to participate in, a three-way discussion between Terry Fenton, who wrote a book on mom, and Tom Smart, the Executive Director and CEO of the McMichael. Mom didn’t have her own mike so after Tom asked a question he’d pass it over to her. And then she’d hold it too far away.

“Mom!” I yelled out (loud enough that I didn’t need a mike), “Hold the mike closer to your mouth?”

Well, that kind of stopped the discussion for a moment, but if she’s going to go all that way to do a talk I wanted people to hear her. I think I did it 3 more times. By the end of the talk, my sister, Rebecca, her daughter, Molly, and I were all leaning forward, perched on the edge of our chairs, miming shoving a mike in our faces. But mom sailed on. She had the audience laughing – she’s far funnier than we gave her credit for.

And then during the Q&A my other sister, Catherine, leapt up and continued the talk, saying, “I know mom wanted to say …” But the thing is that she and mom had been talking about key points she wanted to mention, namely that mom, who is known as a prairie painter from Saskatchewan, has in fact painted Ontario. I can vouch for this because I was with her. We took a trip to Muskoka together to trace her family’s roots. And on another occasion we went to Elora for a wedding. All the while photographing and/or watercolouring. So naturally Catherine wanted to squeeze this fact in.

After the talk at the McMichael and we’d had a chance to see mom’s show, which is huge by the way, I’d had no idea – it takes over at least 3 or 4 rooms, the sun came out and we were able to go outside and have a glass of wine with some friends who had flown in for the occasion.

“Mom!” I barked. “Get out of the sun! Come and sit in the shade.”

“We’ve been freezing in Saskatchewan,” she said. “This feels great.”

“Mom!” I said, half an hour later. “Come and sit in the shade.”

“I’m fine,” she said, for the umpteenth time. “I’m having fun.”

But I was sure she’d be exhausted the next day, and I was worried that she’d overdone it when I dashed over to the hotel to see her off the next morning. It’s bound to affect a person – the air travel, the stress, the standing, the pressure of giving a talk in front of more than 100 people. She’ll be glad to get home, I thought.

I walked into the hotel room and peered at her anxiously, but there she was, bright and chipper. “I wish I had another day here,” she said. The moral of the story? Never underestimate your mom.

For more information on Dorothy Knowles Land Marks read this article by cultural reporter, Lesley Peterson. She also wrote about the McMichael Collection.

Moody!

I’m not one to brag (okay, I kind of am) but I feel I simply must bring the world’s attention to the fact that my mother, Dorothy Knowles, is having an art show Dorothy Knowles Land Marks at the McMichael Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario this weekend. She’s flown in for the opening on Sunday along with my sister Catherine from Saskatoon and my other sister Rebecca and her daughter Molly from Chicago. Now this is extremely fun, not least because it means a lot of shopping, though luckily I managed to desist from buying that $1095 gorgeous black leather jacket at TNT on Eglinton West this afternoon, where we stopped in after visiting the Nikola Rukaj Gallery. I didn’t want to desist – but I thought paying my rent next month might be fun, too.

The action-packed weekend starts on Saturday (June 5) with a small retrospective of my mom’s paintings, including work from the 60′s, at Miriam Shiell Fine Art Ltd, a gallery in Yorkville. And luckily I managed to fit in some shopping yesterday – although it wasn’t a black leather jacket at TNT – so now at least I have something to wear. And so does my sister Catherine who did buy a lovely top at TNT, which wasn’t nearly $1095, and I tried it on first but unfortunately it didn’t suit me. Waah.

Also included on this weekend itinerary will be much eating. Possibly Il Posto and One at the Hazelton Hotel. Oh, I hope it’s nice enough to sit on the patio and drink white wine. Not that I can’t drink white wine if it rains, but it’s not the same.

Back to the McMichael. There are big doin’s on Sunday, with three different art shows happening: 1) a Group of Seven exhibit (big surprise there, the McMichael is the spiritual home of the Group of Seven) called The Group of Seven: Revelations and Changing Perspectives; 2) a Group of Seven-influenced show called Following in the Footsteps of the Group of Seven; and then, of course, the exhibition of Dorothy Knowles, an artist who, I can say with some certainty, wasn’t influenced by the Group of Seven at all, since we looked at other things out West during our influencial years. Not that we wouldn’t have looked at the Group of Seven if we’d had the option, I’m just saying that they weren’t quite as omnipresent in the prairies as they seem to be here.

So there you have it, the perfect weekend planned.

Look at me! I'm a prairie painting!

In honor of my father’s show opening in Calgary tomorrow I am adding another William Perehudoff essay – but don’t worry, I didn’t write it! Helen Zenith, director/owner of the spacious chic NewZones Gallery in Calgary is a former painter who writes about working with my father in New York.

Seventies Stripes are hot! hot! hot!

WILLIAM PEREHUDOFF

50 Years of Abstraction

April 24 – June 5

at NewZones Gallery, 730 11th Ave SW, Calagary

www.newzones.com

                “Summer of 1987 at Triangle in Pine Plains, New York is when I first met William Perehudoff. As if it was yesterday, I remember a group of us in Bill’s studio looking at his paintings. It was an exciting time in my life; I was a young artist mingling with art world ‘heavyweights’ such as British Sculptor Sir Anthony Caro, world renowned art historian-critic Clement Greenberg, New York art dealer André Emmerich with his art-star Helen Frankenthaler, and highly regarded senior Canadian painter, William Perehudoff!
When Bill spoke about his work, his voice was quiet and his tone was serious, yet he was so humble and generous towards the young artists participating in the workshop. I remember Clement Greenberg, ten years Bill’s senior (Bill was 68), put his arm around Bill and called him “my Boychick”, (a Yiddish term of endearment towards one’s son), as he spoke glowingly of Bill’s paintings. On this lovely July ’87 morning, William Perehudoff was celebrated by the greatest ‘players’ in Abstract Art of the 20th century!
Our exhibition, FIFTY is a personal tribute to William Perehudoff. Tamar and I are privileged as well as honoured to know William and be able to share with you some special paintings. I personally selected the body of work which spans 5 decades. Today, William Perehudoff is 92 years old and this exhibition celebrates fifty years of abstraction: five decades of painting.”

Well, this is one blog post many people won’t read. But I’m posting it anyway just in case there a few art aficionados out there who are panting to read about my father’s paintings from the 80′s. Actually, when I think of it, there are probably way more people interested in my dad’s 80′s paintings than in my stupid meanderings, but whatevaaahhh.

My dad rocks!

My dad, now in long term care, unable to walk and not doing well healthwise, still rocks when it comes to his art A painter with a career spanning decades, he devoted more time and thought to the art of composition and colour than anyone will ever know. I can still see him, sitting in his chair in his studio, studying a book on Matisse as if it held the key to the Holy Grail – and for him, in a way, it did.

Lately his work from the 60′s has been getting a lot of buzz – so much so that we rarely let our few remaining 60′s work go out to the galleries – and his 90′s work is a big draw, but when a museum wanted to know more about his work from the 80′s – and a few specific paintings in particular - it made me re-look at this pivotal time in his career. So here’s the essay I wrote. Read it and tell me I’ll never be an art writer ….

William Perehudoff – Placing the 80’s Work in Context

Thick gel is fun!

By Carol Perehudoff

            William Perehudoff is one of Canada’s foremost modernist painters. His career has spanned six decades and his work is found in numerous public collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Canada Council Art Bank, the Montreal Museum of Fine Art and the Museum of Civilization.

            Known primarily as a colorist, Perehudoff was born in 1918 to Doukhobor parents. He grew up near Langham, Saskatchewan, and his representation of space has always been influenced by the wide expanse of the prairies. There have been other influences. His interest in Mexican muralists like Diego Rivera took him to the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center to study with the eminent French muralist, Jean Charlot. Charlot encouraged Perehudoff to go to New York where he studied with Amédée Ozenfant, one of the co-founders, along with Le Corbusier, of Purism, an offshoot of Cubism with the decorative elements stripped away.

            In the late fifties, Perehudoff began attending the Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops in northern Saskatchewan. This brought him into contact with international artists and critics like Color Field painters Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski, and perhaps most importantly, the New York art critic Clement Greenberg, who was supportive of Perehudoff’s direction toward pure abstraction.

            After the 60’s, mainly known for his large-scale works using circles and rectangular blocks of colour on raw canvas, and the 70’s, known for thin stripes on stained backgrounds, Perehudoff branched out. At this time, feeling that the 70’s work was fully realized, Greenberg encouraged him to explore new avenues.

It floats, it hovers ... it's a Perehudoff painting!

            Just at this time, Perehudoff was becoming interested in texture, using thick acrylic gel to create organic shapes that extend out from the flat surface of the canvas. The coloured shapes, similar in size and topology to the hard-edged rectangles of the 60’s, are nonetheless very different because they are completely gestural. These gel works have an immediacy about them because there is no rethinking the placement – the gel is thick, the colour pure and once on, it cannot be removed or rethought. With only one chance to get it right this gel series, which Perehudoff worked on throughout the early 80’s, challenged him to incorporate a new confidence into his brushwork. The end result is a calligraphy-like quickness and liveliness previously unseen.

            The three paper works, AP-82-002, AP-82-011 and AP-82-13, are all excellent examples of this series. Thick gel on raw paper backgrounds, they allow a play of colour and texture together which, in some cases, becomes quite sculptural. It was an important time in Perehudoff’s artistic career, a wide exploration between the flat more rigid geometric forms of the 60’s and stripes of the 70’s, and his later 90’s work which incorporates both stripes and rectangles.

            The canvases AC-88-47 and AC-88-16 are prime examples of the next stage in Perehudoff’s career and show yet another new mode of working with colour. Toward the mid to late 80’s, Perehudoff pares out the thick gel, but retains the more organic or biological shapes of colour that show this immediate, rather than static, brushwork. Now the background comes more into play. In AC-88-47 thin stains of diaphanous colour loosely echo the square of the canvas to contain the central colour forms. This is where Perehudoff’s mastery of composition comes into play. The central forms neither simply recede through this window-like opening, nor extend out, but hover, creating a vibration between back and forwards, bringing a soft vitality to the painting.

I am diaphanous!

            In AC-88-16, the background stain becomes a diamond and the watercolour-like thinness of the layered aqua stain adds to this vibrating effect, acting as an intermediary linking the central forms with the luminous purple stain of the perimeter background colour.

            This ‘window’ series was far more prevalent that many people realize, preoccupying Perehudoff for a number of years as he explores soft colours, spatial perception and the dialogue between depth and composition, an important step in an evolution of styles that reveals a lasting preoccupation with color harmonies and form.

            A recipient of the Order of Canada, the Saskatchewan Order of Merit and a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Art, William Perehudoff has exhibited widely in Canada, the US and Europe, including a widely-publicized exhibition at Canada House in London, UK, and in The Shape of Colour exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

The temperature might be low but the hip factor of Saskatoon has risen with the installation Through and Through and Through by artist Marie Lannoo at the city’s Mendel Art Gallery.

Art Immersion

 My mom and I went down to the gallery to meet Lannoo and get a personal tour of the show and let me tell you, the Mendel was hopping.

Saskatoon's much loved art gallery

We were all putting on little blue booties and tramping into Lannoo’s psychedelic space, which is is not only groovy but scientific. While it feels like being inside a rainbow with colours radiating off the walls and spilling onto the floor, it’s more than a pretty face. The rounded walls covered with prismatic foil have 17,000 grooves (really, they’re called defraction gradings but whatever) per square milimetre that capture the light, split it up and cause this full colour spectrum radiation. Um, I mean that they radiate in a good way, not in an electromagnetic pollutant kind of way. Let’s call it an all-natural colour  experience.

Groovy!

I asked Marie to tell me what the show was about in a line or two (so that I could then pass the info on to you, dear Reader) and she said: “Light interacts with matter in painting and sculpture to produce colour in many ways and that’s what this exhibition is about.”

Artist Marie Lannoo

So there you have it. She wanted to increase the dimensional component of colour. And why not? Three dimensions are so passe.

After I enjoyed the full-bodied colour swirly immersion, I went for a walk along the riverbank for some basic sunlight immersion - highly appreciated in a Saskatchewan winter. And, just so you know, Saskatoon boasts the most days of sunlight in Canada.

Where's the rainbow?

It seemed a bit, er, white after Lannoo’s show, but I knew the colour was out there, I just needed a few thousand defraction gradings to decode it. You know, Dorothy aka Judy Garland might have wanted to go over the rainbow in the Wizard of Oz, but she should have aimed for Saskatchewan, she could have enjoyed an in-the-rainbow experience instead.

I’m just back from the Bahamas, and from pirate loot to unexplored cave systems, Grand Bahama is a grand island indeed. I may not be tanned but at least I ended up with plenty to write about.

Now I have to go from beach mode to art mode and I have to do it fast. My brother-in-law, Graham Fowler, is having an art opening at Gevick Gallery in Toronto’s chi chi Yorkville this afternoon at 12 Hazelton Avenue.

That man can really paint!

Last time I went to one of his art exhibits it was in London, England, on the posh gallery row of Cork Street where he had a two-person show with my sister, Catherine. It was a different party in the gallery every night for four evenings running. Why don’t they do that here?

Although at times it might have got carried away. I remember one night when the art dealer who organized the exhibition had to toss out one scraggley Brit found crouched behind the catering table chugging straight from a bottle of champagne. At least I know enough to drink my champagne from a plastic glass.

Private Dock

This Saturday my sister, Chicago-based artist Rebecca Perehudoff, is having an art opening at The Gallery/Art Placement Inc. in Saskatoon. Unfortunately I won’t be there, but she’ll be at the opening and you can see the work here.  

The paintings were inspired by the wild moody area around Emma Lake in northern Saskatchewan where I spent a good part of my summers growing up. It’s a magnet for artists because of the Emma Lake Art Camp (now called the Kenderdine Campus). A lot of British and New York artists made there way up there, including composer John Cage who got lost in the muskeg overnight and had to pick wild mushrooms to eat. Once he was rescued he fried up the rest and fed them to the resident artists. Luckily he just happened to be a mushroom expert so no one got poisoned.

One of my earliest memories there is being involved in a Happening – which was a forerunner to performance art. It was dark. I was six, and my sister Catherine and I, along with some other local kids, were conscripted to dress up in sheets, climb onto the back of a truck and feed people peach slices out of baggies. There was also a dancing naked woman covered in gold paint – I vaguely recall that the paint wouldn’t come off and that a bunch of women had to scrub her down in the communal bathroom. Good clean fun!

I hear that the art workshops are a lot tamer now - and that Happenings are happening no more – but for the artists who venture there,  it’s just as inspiring.