When Wendy shows me her latest painting over video chat, the first thing I notice isn’t the brushwork or the colours. It’s the way she holds it, like she’s introducing me to someone she knows well. The white pines lean toward each other across the canvas, and she tells me she thinks of them as friends reaching out to one another.
“I think about what they’ve seen,” she says. “The boaters, the canoes, people passing by. Their age. How old are they?”
This is how Wendy sees the world. The dying trees are just as beautiful as the living ones. Sometimes she loves them even more.
Thirteen years ago, when Wendy retired from teaching music, she started exploring art in a way she’d always wanted to but never had time for. She’s always been creative. As a music teacher, she found ways to bring art into everything. Kids drawing to music. Painting backdrops for musicals. Art and music woven together because she couldn’t really separate them.
“I probably always wanted to be an art teacher,” she tells me. “But when I was choosing university, the jobs were in music and French. I knew I didn’t want to teach French, so I majored in music.”
After retirement, she made up for lost time. She took too many classes to count from well-known artists, learning watercolor, acrylic, mixed media, everything. She always wanted to try oil painting, but she never found the right teacher who made it easy enough. Then two years ago, she took a weekend class with Gordon Harrison. (Some claim he’s going to be the eighth member of the Group of Seven.) He simplified oil completely, and she’s barely put down the brush since.
“It’s kind of like butter,” she says about oil paint. “You can change how thick or thin it is. You can blend colours easily. With acrylic, everything dries in minutes. With oil, the possibilities are endless.”
Now she paints the Canadian landscape. Muskoka, Georgian Bay, the places where people kayak and canoe and do all the things they like to do on vacation. Places that feel peaceful and quiet. Places people have traveled with family, rented cottages, or just wish they could visit. She paints from photos she takes in her rowboat, capturing those moments when the reflection of the trees on the water is so perfect you can’t tell which is real.
“Some days when it’s calm, you get these Blue Sky Days or Creamsicle Sky Days,” she says. “The reflection is so exact, you just cannot believe it.”
A typical painting takes about three weeks. Two weeks of thinking about it, maybe a day or two to finish it, then five more days to look at it and make adjustments.
If you had to narrow down what Wendy paints, it’s water, rocks (the Canadian Shield kind), and white pine. Always the white pine. When there’s a group of them together, she sees friends. When they’re leaning toward each other, she sees two people reaching out. She wonders about their lives, what they’ve witnessed, how old they are.
“They always say look at art instead of your phone,” she tells me near the end of our conversation. “If I can get someone to have a feeling or just take time to think about my piece of art, that’s kind of my goal.”
That’s what keeps her going. The beauty in the world. The need to paint it, to capture it, to share it. To make us stop scrolling and start seeing again.
