An Improbable Place: part one

The author of this story, Richard Stanford, is an artist, writer and photographer; his work is often on display at the Arbor Gallery in Vankleek Hill. Over the next four weeks, The Review will be presenting his one of his written works, entitled "An Improbable Place."

Flowing along a gravel grey road through a land so flat you'd think you are in Saskatchewan, kicking up a stream of dust that was once the sediment of the great sea that covered this land thousands of years ago, you can feel that you are the only person left in the world, the air so fluid you feel that you might drown.

You can, of course, feel that way on the corner of Ste. Catherine and St. Laurent in Montréal on a Saturday night. Here at an intersection of endless cornfields, you might think that culture or art of any kind could not possibly exist. It all looks empty and desolate and we all judge books by their covers and culture by its sacred cows.

This cornfield is in the middle of the triangle that forms the southeastern end of Ontario with the western tip of Québec. Bounded to the north by the Ottawa River and to the south by the St. Lawrence, the great sea left behind a black gold of its millions of years here: a land rich for farming and painting and photography and sculpture.

How rich? If you went along the internet highway to the website for ARTSEO, (www.artseo.com) you would find that this region is home to more than 205 artists and 12 active galleries. If you were standing at the corner of Bloor and Yonge Streets in Toronto, you would not think it odd at all to have 200 artists working in the area.

But out here is a different story altogether.

How is it that under this big sky there are so many artists creating work that is at once of this place and not of this place at all? Is the critical mass of artistic expression in this region a pure accident of circumstance or a perfect reflection of this place and its disappearances?

Along one of these roads near the town of Alexandria, Brenda Kennedy has been has been exhibiting her paintings for over thirty years. A graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, her work is in both public and private collections in Canada, the United States and Europe. Not surprisingly, in a painting like "Oatfield" (pictured above), it is the big sky that has inspired Kennedy and which speaks to her sense of this place where the sky dominates and the open road vanishes into the distance.

"Artists in the city yearn for this kind of isolation," says Kennedy. "But out here, you have in fact gotten off the bus. After a while you can't figure out why you're here in the country.  Isolation is not something you have to yearn for here - its part of our daily lives."

There are complex feelings explored in Kennedy's "Where She Sat." This isn't just any private space - it is one that holds deep emotional significance. Rather than rendering a maudlin portrait of a lost loved one - in this case a stepmother - Kennedy exercises remarkable restraint in giving us minimal evidence of a full life with an almost forensic eye: the chair, well-used even though we are given only an edge of it; the window looking out to the world and its dying light; and the telephone with its wire coiled suggesting the unconscious nervous fidgeting that often accompanies long phone conversations. This is a story of the death of a loved one, the dying of the light and the first of many disappearances.

For one: the Grand Hotel of Caledonia Springs. In its heyday between 1875 and 1915, the Grand Hotel stood proudly over a village of pavilions, rooming houses, a spring-fed heated swimming pool and a bottling plant whose Seltzer Water won first prize at the Chicago World Fair in 1893.

The violins and pianos have long stopped playing. Like the ruins of ancient Mayan temples hidden amid the jungle's undergrowth, the remains of a stately hotel and its mineral springs are lost amid the overgrown bush about 10 kilometres southeast of Alfred, Ontario.

There is little to recall the luxurious Victorian lifestyle of the gentry who came by train from Ottawa and Montréal more than a century ago to bathe in the warm, welcoming waters of the mineral springs. Only the deteriorating stone walls of the old bottling plant can be glimpsed like a ghost house lurking from the glare of the present.

All that remains are the cement sidewalks now leading to nowhere, unlike the sidewalk along Home Street in Vankleek Hill from which you turn off into a copse of trees behind the farm co-op store and take the curving dirt road up the incline to the red brick building that is the Arbor Gallery - Centre for Contemporary Art (www.arborgallery.org).

Here the chances are excellent that you will see just about anything - a place in a perpetual state of surprise of paintings, drawings, sculpture, and photography.

Look out for part two in next week's issue of The Review.