Beyond the Stone Angel: artists reflect on the death of their parents, MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina, Saskatchewan. Installation view of Mortsaf for My Father series. Image courtesy MacKenzie Art Gallery 2021
I collect stones; they remind me of time and places, and I'd been working on a series of paintings of them (the beginnings of the Mortsaf series) when my father died in 2012. The times and places I associated most closely with my Dad were related to our property on a lake in the Laurentian mountains.
Typical of the geography are massive granite boulders, and my father and I gave our own private names to many of those that ring the lake. I began to paint large-scale pictures of these: Mortsaf for My Father: Balcony Rock, 2014; Mortsaf for My Father: Resting Rock, 2016; and Mortsaf for My Father: Sanctuary, 2021.