Art, health and the power of great soup

 Connected

Acrylic on canvas

24 x 24 inches

Barbara Muir © 2011

(This is the final, she went into the show today.  Please

note that her name has changed.)

To see this painting and my other two 

paintings in the Skype portraits series,

plus many other wonderful paintings please

come out to the Inaugural Show of the

International Guild for Figurative Art

at Studio Vogue at the new address --

216 Avenue Road -- between 5 and 7 p.m.,

this Saturday, February 5th.  

 Can't wait to see you there!)

A couple of weekends ago although I knew we should
be out dancing, Steven was working and I was painting
(which if you're having fun, or even just nervous is a lot
like dancing.)  Later we watched a movie
together, but while I was painting I thought about artists and
health.  A raging flu is heading through the city,
every store is selling equipment to organize your
life (baskets, file folders, books on organization).
Then there's the gym equipment -- weights, and
stretchy things, and  CDs on yoga, and yoga
mats in every colour, and high impact exercise
DVDs and  apps.  The window for self improvement
is narrow.  As soon as February dawns tomorrow this
obsession will be over, but should it be?  You need
your health as an artist, to stay creative, attend
 your openings, organize yourself, and to stay
cheerful -- an absolute necessity for artists.

So I finally weighed myself (which I'm supposed
to do every morning), but I've been avoiding it
because my clothes were saying "Hey artist
person you've eaten tooooooo much."  Blame
Christmas, and New Years, and snow, freezing
temperatures and terrific novels. The list could go on
and on, but the result is + 4.5 pounds.  Now that got me
 hopping. I lost 32 pounds in 2010 through dint
of exercise and not eating so much.  So yep that focused
me back on adding up my steps on the pedometer.
One or two more times around the box store my friend.
Ikea is a good one -- nice and large.

But the whole point of this was to thank Norene,
because this grim weight gain thing might have
been infinitely more serious in the summer in
Nova Scotia, the land of the buttered lobster.
But Norene and Greg who own
and operate the Chatterbox Café in Pugwash,
Nova Scotia, made such delicious
soup, that I had soup and half a bakery bun
every day there for lunch and kept losing weight
on holiday.

Norene is an artist, and a wonderful one.  A shout
out to her, but she doesn't have a blog.  However
she did three years ago, and she is the reason I
started blogging.  One of them.  I blogged to get to
her blog -- a short term one in honour of a show she
was having with two other women.

Some of Norene's work

These are pieces she exhibited in the 'From here'

show a couple of years ago.  She did not give me sizes.

 Northwest Cove, Nova Scotia

Budge Wilson herself at home

Acrylic on canvas

Norene Smiley ©

Go West Young Man, Saanichton, British Columbia

Norene's father 

Acrylic on canvas

Norene Smiley ©

Lightness of Being, Lapoile River, Newfoundland

Greg Smiley, a guide and his friend Alan fishing

Acrylic on canvas

Norene Smiley ©

Most artists in Canada do more than one
job to keep the money coming in to feed the family
and put a roof over the studio.  Fact of life here.
I teach, and Norene runs a superb café. The theory
behind getting the café, was that she could paint in
the winter when Pugwash goes back down to 400
residents, from the 4,000 who depend on her delicious
food and coffee and tea and cookies in the summer.

I'm thinking of her on this cold last night in January, and
hoping she is painting or doing a reading.  She
also writes wonderful children's books, and she
and Greg and the café have become a cultural center
in their part of Nova Scotia.

Have a getting-on-the-health-kick-and-liking-it day.