Paint your canvas : Stories about art

Opening conversations or any exchange between people can be challenging. If you can get a hello or how are you from a young adult and you have really accomplished something. They are described as having a language of their own. So how do we begin?

Why not try art? I recently visited the Lord Beaverbrook Gallery collection which was celebrating their 50th anniversary. Fifty lithographs including Andy Warhol and Alex Coville and before I knew it I was back in Ottawa.

Growing up there I visited the National Art Gallery as a matter of course. For years I would visit the gallery and discover everything I could take in. The sightt and smell of the middle ages, the textures and colours of the Group of Seven, the stories of life in countries around the world. It took a few years but I finally spoke to every piece. Now what that says about me is material for another time.

When asked how we reach out to the young adult today I truly believe it is in an ordinary conversation about art.

Art encompasses all that is life, the world and all that. The teen relates to that far reaching, unlimited vastness that is art.

Here are only a few suggestions for exploring art from the perspective of the movie goer.
If you like adventure, romance, danger and challenging authority, share these stories.

Be the teller,

Stories as giftgiving : Familylore begins with you

Received my Holiday Season gifts from my eldest sister yesterday. It arrived, a brown cardboard box, quite plain in appearance but inside years of memories converged. This treasure trove of gifts were the articulation of memories that spanned over three decades.

Amongst the treasures, a weaver had recreated my snowy owl perched on a twig. It had attracted my sister's eye at the Ottawa Weavers and Knitters show. It told me she remembered I had regular visits from an owl very much like it at my hobby farm in Pense Sasktachewan in 1975. I still feel the cold of the prairie, I still hear the deafening quiet, still see the glaring white snow and the sight of this great white owl sitting majestically on the same pole everyday just outside my farm house.

Art galleries have been my favorite sources for inspiration. But it is the gift shop that provides the item or image you can take home. My sister includes every year a wall calendar. It always depicts some master painter, it could be impressionists, or modern, it might even be medieval tapestries. Whatever the theme it conveys my true passions as wide as they are. And only a sister would know. This year it was Gustave Klimpt. Along the same idea were cards, portraits by Klimpt and another set of cards portraying the same medieval tapestry from my calendar of 2007. Hidden deep in the box were humbugs by Robertson, and chocolates from Stubbe's. All my favorites, all precious, all defining a memory and bringing it to light to be shared again.

I wish you and yours the opportunity of sharing your stories over the next few weeks. Make giftgiving one that creates stories in your Familylore.

Be the teller,