How to be an artist

Val Marie in the middle of nowhere One day a while ago, I got up in the morning and fed the cat. Then I went outside to add seed to the bird feeders and back into the house to head for the shower. Much later that day, I found the door was unlocked. This means …

You’re travelling along. It looks like a pretty good direction. Due north, wouldn’t you say? Not a bad road, either. You should arrive by nightfall. Which, with any luck, will be a long time from now. But after a few days or weeks, or even a few years, things start to look different. You haven’t …

Abandoned bales in March I need some outside time and I’m not getting it. The wind has been howling for the last two days. 60km/37mi per hour yesterday and 35km/20mi per hour today. Walking out there is like walking straight against a moving car. I like walking in the wind about as well as I …

A new painting begins on Thursday On Thursday I reached into the future and took hold of a fistful of something. It felt like smoke that pleated where my hand closed around it. A painting began. The smoke drifted out from around the edges of my palm. On Friday I went on March’s Adventure. Monthly …

A quest for the future Each new painting feels like you’re reaching deep into the future. You don’t even know if it’s a future that exists. There are so many possible futures. Yet this painting must take you into some kind of future, because to stay where you are is to die. And at the …

Opening up The first walk in a new season. It isn’t quite spring, but neither is it glacial. To step out without watching my feet and tensing for an inevitable tumble onto unforgiving ice  – I can almost fly. Winter where I live is always cold. The only question is only how far the mercury …

Mostly-finished painting I prefer not to be out of the studio for too many days in a row. The longer I’m away, the harder it is to remember where I was. For the same reason, I usually work in series, trying not to hold multiple visual thoughts at the same time. But if neither condition …

Linda Duvall, artist collaborator Which is the best part of collaborating with another artist whose work you admire and respect? Pick a word. Each is the best part. Linda Duvall is a Saskatoon-based visual artist whose projects focus on how individuals emerge and are revealed within a societal context. In most projects, Linda starts by …

Old cat resting There are days when spirit aligns with circumstance and everything flows. And weeks when those days string together. You can’t imagine anything happening to spoil it. Then, without warning, comes a different kind of day. It feels like all kind of spirit just left town. The sun won’t quite come out and …

“The Unacknowledged (interlude)” by Laureen Marchand, 2016, oil/board, 5″ x 5″ Until this project showed up in my artist’s life, I hadn’t painted in black and white for a long time. I used to. There was a period of several years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and sometimes up to a decade later, …

“The Unacknowledged (part 1)” by Laureen Marchand, 2016, oil/board, 6″ x 6″ The definition of an adventure is that you don’t know how it will turn out. My 2016 new year’s resolution was to plan an Adventure for each month of this year. January’s was a winter driving trip back to my old home city …

Val Marie, December Blue On a cold winter day in the late afternoon, I’m walking. This narrow gravelled road surrounded by the wide hills of Saskatchewan’s southwest grasslands, near my home in Val Marie, is a favourite route for its varied and beautiful terrain and for its feeling of remote emptiness, even though I can …

House sparrows in unexpected late afternoon sun with wind This time of year on the southern Canadian prairies you want all the life you can get. 16 hours out of every 24 are night-time, and though our daytime highs are cold at -5C/23F , that isn’t quite cold enough to freeze cloud and fog out …

Metamorphic, by Laureen Marchand (oil/board) The artist’s brain is like a labyrinth, a maze in an old fashioned garden. Try this path. Now that one. Turn left. Retrace your steps. Turn right three times. In the centre, untold delights await. On the other side, incredible vistas. Usually the hedges that form these green walls are …

Inuit throat singers at Prime Minister’s swearing-in ceremony (CBC photo, Globe & Mail video) What do you do when you reach for a goal and don’t quite get there? It was a moment for the history books. At the swearing-in ceremony for Canada’s new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Nov. 4, 2015, two young Inuit …

Laureen Marchand, “Blown” (oil/board) to be exhibited at Assiniboia Gallery beginning Nov. 21, 2015 What will you do when you get what you want? In the insightful and brilliantly supportive book Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland (Every artist should own a copy! Get yours now!), the authors talk about what stops …

Laureen Marchand, “September Song” (oil/board) to be exhibited at the Assiniboia Gallery beginning Nov. 20, 2015 This was my research question: How does sharing work in progress affect the work’s completion? So far I have a small sample of data. Firm conclusions cannot be drawn. But the data I have is exciting. Last week I …

Painting progression, October 12, 2015 I begin each painting with a drawing on the painting surface, an elaborate contour drawing that provides the initial structure. Then I apply a wash of colour to produce a warm underpainting. After that, I mix oil paint colours in response to my source photo, aiming to develop one area …

Painting progression, October 10, 2015 Usually I’m all about product. Even though I know that process is how you get product, product is what I want. But my production’s been slow lately. And I wonder if my focus has been too much on outcome. Maybe I should pay more attention to the journey than its …

Painting progression, October 6, 2015 What do you do when you’re unsure about the quality of your own artwork? Do you reach out, try to learn, ask for help? Or do you hole up and wait for the uncertainty to pass? Do you go public or do you hide? I tend to hide. I like …

The Shaw Street Collective at Val Marie School It’s Saturday evening and I’m sitting on a hard plastic chair in an echo-y school gym at the end of a hot, un-air conditioned day. I’m here to listen to a classical music quartet as part of a summer-long artist residency program in the tiny village of …

“Escalator” by Joanna Gresik (acrylic, conte, paint marker and graphite/canvas) This summer I spoke with a young artist. Fresh from a Master’s degree completed in June, she’s just beginning her artistic career. She was finding these weeks a huge transition. When you’re in school, you have structure. Feedback. Community. The expectation of production and growth. …