After class, we went
touring and saw several Maud Lewis homesteads and a slew of Frenchys.
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| Ben Loman Harbour, c. 1952, by Maud Lewis |
Poppy Balser is doing exactly what she should be doing in
this workshop, spending hours putting us through technical exercises with big
fat brushes. They’re very informative but not particularly photogenic.
After class, she offered to show us the sights. This is a
beautiful area of mists and moors and glowering headlands, so we jumped at the
chance. We started our tour at the Point Prim
lighthouse. There’s been a light at this location since 1804, but this is a
spare, uncompromising iteration built in 1964. Still, it’s very beautiful. It’s
located on a wild, rocky headland at the mouth of Digby Gut and is surrounded by
weathered, stunted trees and massive basalt and granite shelves.
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| One of many exercises I painted in yesterday's class. |
Around Digby, the buzz is all about a
movie depicting the life and marriage of Nova Scotia folk artist Maud Lewis. It was just
released in Canada and is to open in the US in a few days.
Lewis was born in Yarmouth, NS in 1903. She suffered a
severe form of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis that caused her to be unusually
small and almost chinless. Today, with her physical deformities, she would have been cared for by the state, but that wasn't so in 1937. She moved to Digby to live
with her aunt. In 1938, she married forty-year-old bachelor fish peddler
Everett Lewis.
According to her husband, Maud answered an ad he had posted for
a “live-in or keep house” housekeeper. They married a few weeks later and moved
into his tiny one-room cabin a few miles west of Digby.
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| Provincial memorial at the site, more or less, of Maud Lewis' home. |
Lewis accompanied her husband on his daily rounds peddling
fish, bringing Christmas cards that she had drawn. Emboldened by her success,
she started to paint on beaverboard, old cookie sheets and Masonite. Her
worsening arthritis meant she was unable to do housework, so Everett did the
housework and Maud sold paintings for very small sums of money.
Her original house is now in the Art
Gallery of Nova Scotia. The province has thoughtfully erected a steel memorial
model close to its original location. Driving toward Digby Neck on a parallel
road, we came across a sign pointing us toward another replica of her house. We
squelched down a dirt lane to find it. It was built in 1990 by retired
fisherman Murray Ross, and is complete with Everett’s shop and their mailbox.
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| Murray Ross' iteration of Maud Lewis' home. |
We’ve been baffled by signs for something called Frenchys. It turns out that a Frenchy is
a used clothing store. These were pioneered by Edwin Therialult. In the 1970s,
he started imported used clothing from the United States to make cleaning
cloths he called “wipers.” Some of the
clothes were too good to shred, so he opened an outlet to resell them.
Fortunately, he didn’t trademark the name, so a “Frenchy” is now a used
clothing store. They’re big business around here. Guy’s Frenchys has seventeen
stores and is just one of the chains using that name.
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| Headlands in the gathering dusk. |
According to the cognoscenti, if you buy someone a gift item
at a Frenchy, you should tell them it “had tags.”
