Summer invariably requires a trip to a wharf to buy several fresh lobsters directly from the fishermen or a stop at a lobster processing plant. The women who work in these plants are generally a hardy crew. I love to see them rushing out after work, smokes at the ready, still in hairnets and rubber boots, being collected by husbands or boyfriends in pick-ups or Camarros. I wanted to capture the colourful and lively nature of these people, and the character of their lives, on canvas.

It was while beachcombing on PEI that I had the idea of using the bows of broken lobster traps for frames. I felt they would convey a certain sense of being trapped within the circumstanciality of place while providing a window into and/or out of that place.

The sub-series of “Rita and Betty” paintings speaks symbolically of how we tend to become inured and insensitive to our surroundings. The two women are shown always more involved in discussing the minutiae of their lives than in any sort of connectedness with the beauty and energy of their environment. While Rita’s inevitable cigarette signifies a certain tough rebelliousness on her part, it also represents the repressed anger and frustration burning inside her: rather than break out of the mold she was born into due to place and circumstance and find her own voice, she chooses to remain silent. All we see of her inner fire are the smoke-signals she sends up. Betty, on the other hand, is forever expressing her opinions and proferring advice. We understand that both women are seeking to add colour and interest to their lives through purely external means as we follow them on various excursions involving new outfits.
After an endless winter and brief spring, summer in the Maritimes seems to explode with a lushness of green foliage and multi-coloured wildflowers. The energy sizzles over into festivals, county fairs, and music-making kitchen parties. With each passing summer, I collect new experiences, souvenirs, photos and memories. From fishers, farmers and fiddlers to lighthouses, lupins and lobsters: each moment fills me with delight and moves me to reinvent it in paint.

In this era of Post-Modernism I like to describe the style of my Maritimes Series as Post-Naive, borrowing from the folk art idiom but rendered in a formally trained technique that also reflects detailed Persian miniatures. The intention behind my work is akin to that of the Japanese ukiyo-e artists in seeking to capture a moment of everyday existence from the transient, or “floating” world that passes before my eyes. Through these paintings I have hoped to remind the viewer to look with both humour and compassion upon our human endeavours and to take delight in the world of our own backyards.
The Maritimes Series was shown originally in 1993 and has travelled, in various configurations, from PEI to BC over the years. In all, there have been thirty canvasses and no further paintings will be made in the series.

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