{"id":22783,"date":"2022-07-12T09:00:10","date_gmt":"2022-07-12T16:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=22783"},"modified":"2022-07-04T13:18:34","modified_gmt":"2022-07-04T20:18:34","slug":"new-exhibit-pays-homage-to-maud-lewis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2022\/07\/12\/new-exhibit-pays-homage-to-maud-lewis\/","title":{"rendered":"New exhibit pays homage to Maud Lewis"},"content":{"rendered":"

Canadian folk painter Maud Lewis died in 1970, but her work lives on. The exhibit Maud Lewis <\/i>is touring Canada, with Victoria getting the only BC stop at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.<\/p>\n

Lewis didn\u2019t grow up with privilege, and that shows in her art, says McMichael Canadian Art Collection chief curator Sarah Milroy (McMichael is an art museum in Vaughan, Ontario that organized this collection).<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can see that in the way she treats her animal substance in her paintings,\u201d says Milroy. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of charm, a lot of kind of a sense of their spirit in some of those pictures and paintings, of those animal creatures that would have been around her. She started making art as little Christmas cards as a little commercial undertaking with her mother, those were her first efforts. And then, she had a series of misadventures.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Maud Lewis<\/em> showcases Lewis’ work (image provided).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Milroy says the history behind how Lewis became an artist is interesting.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe started looking for a job and saw an ad in the general store from a guy that lived out on the highway who was looking for a housekeeper. So, she walked out, which was not easy for her, the many miles to his house and banged on the door and said, \u2018You need a housekeeper, I need a job.\u2019 He hired her, but then it became clear that she would have to live there because of the journey in and out of town. But she said, \u2018Well, I\u2019m not going to live with you unless you marry me.\u2019 So, he married her to be his housekeeper.\u201d<\/p>\n

Milroy explains that Lewis\u2019 husband was a fish peddler, going door to door selling his fish, so she starts selling her paintings with him.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd pretty soon they are making more money from her paintings than from his fish. And at the end of the day, she spent her days making art, and he spent his days looking after the house,\u201d she says. \u201cShe totally turned the table and found a way despite everything, and her physical problems [as a result of rheumatoid arthritis] were very real. They were living in extreme poverty in a tiny little shack by the highway, which, of course, she famously covered with paintings inside and out, and then she would hang out her shingle\u2013the road sign in the show says \u2018paintings for sale,\u2019 which is also the title of her book.\u201d<\/p>\n

Milroy says that in the past, Lewis\u2019 work hasn\u2019t always been displayed as if she was a serious artist and that they wanted to do it differently this time so people would understand her full potential and the beauty of her work.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we wanted to do is kind of address that head on and show a whole bunch of cat paintings together, a whole bunch of cow paintings together\u2026 so that you actually, instead of seeing sameness, what you actually see is variation,\u201d says Milroy. \u201cBecause you can quickly and immediately see that she is still changing it up. She\u2019s keeping it interesting for herself. She is setting herself new challenges.\u201d<\/p>\n

Milroy says that she has seen a \u201cMaud effect\u201d with some people who come to see the artist\u2019s works.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople come back again and again,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Maud Lewis
\n<\/i>Until Sunday, October 16
\nArt Gallery of Greater Victoria
\naggv.ca<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Canadian folk painter Maud Lewis died in 1970, but her work lives on. The exhibit Maud Lewis is touring Canada, with Victoria getting the only BC stop at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. Lewis didn\u2019t grow up with privilege, and that shows in her art, says McMichael Canadian Art Collection chief curator Sarah Milroy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22784,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,9,270],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts","category-webexclusive","category-july-6-2022"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22783"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22819,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22783\/revisions\/22819"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}