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’t 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).
“You can see that in the way she treats her animal substance in her paintings,” says Milroy. “There’s 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.”
Milroy says the history behind how Lewis became an artist is interesting.
“She 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, ‘You need a housekeeper, I need a job.’ 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, ‘Well, I’m not going to live with you unless you marry me.’ So, he married her to be his housekeeper.”
Milroy explains that Lewis’ husband was a fish peddler, going door to door selling his fish, so she starts selling her paintings with him.
“And 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,” she says. “She 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–the road sign in the show says ‘paintings for sale,’ which is also the title of her book.”
Milroy says that in the past, Lewis’ work hasn’t 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.
“What 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… so that you actually, instead of seeing sameness, what you actually see is variation,” says Milroy. “Because you can quickly and immediately see that she is still changing it up. She’s keeping it interesting for herself. She is setting herself new challenges.”
Milroy says that she has seen a “Maud effect” with some people who come to see the artist’s works.
“People come back again and again,” she says.
Maud Lewis
Until Sunday, October 16
Art Gallery of Greater Victoria
aggv.ca