Pending Sun

This name came when I took a photo of this hanging when I was half way done. I absentmindedly titled the jpg “Pending Sun” because it wasn’t yet complete. It just stuck.

This one sent me to physiotherapy for the first time with tendonitis. I sometimes become so involved while painting I don’t notice the time go by, and certainly don’t feel like stopping just because I get an intense sharp shooting pain through my hand. Sometimes I will paint for up to 12 hours straight. I think I’d painted for about 3 days straight over a long weekend with this one, and when I got into work and suddenly couldn’t move my hand, let alone hold a pen or type, I knew I was in trouble. Had the paw bandaged up, and was in intense physio for the next 6 weeks before I was allowed to paint again. Luckily my physio-terrorist was also an artist
(carver) so he understood the intensity and focus artists get while they are working. Didn’t make the treatment any less torturous though! And of course… little did I know then that I would be again at his mercy a year and a half later (June/July 2005) for the same ailment.

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Hanging 11 – untitled

This design has been a bit of an evolving work in progress, but definitely one of my favourites which is why I have done so many of them.

It has the sun and moon I use quite often, followed by a different take on the cycle of life (why I found it appropriate to give to the hospice). The bird (yin and yang) for flight, and the whale for perseverance.

This is one of the pieces I donated to the Sarcee Hospice, where I work (when I have time… sorry Sandy, I’ve been really busy… honest!!!) as a Palliative Care Crisis Volunteer.

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2 Tigers

Two Tigers went again to my biggest fans and cheering section, Andy and Fiona. I blame the fact that they bought a bright red couch as the reason I had to paint them a new hanging (nice couch, but the colour was as aesthetically at war with the original hanging I painted them as possible – quite certain they did that on purpose). I had this idea in mind anyway, so whether they wanted it or not, it was going to them. As a side note, that bright red couch is now sitting in my basement… a year and a half later they decided a black leather couch suited them better…grrrrrr…

Tastes in couches and the inability to MAKE UP THEIR MIND aside (hee hee hee), this hanging is really all about Andy and Fiona. Two Tigers represents their Chinese year of birth (1974…sheesh…puppies, the lot of em’…) and is indicated in one of the squares (bottom row, 2nd from left). Another square is a pair of swans with their necks intertwined (top row, 3rd from left). Swans mate for life… so, well, all I can say is they’d better stay together other than call me a liar!

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Self

This was the 4th hanging I did (originally for Andy and Fiona until that whole couch fiasco – see 2 Tigers for details). Fiona challenged me to show more of my own essence through this one.

Top Row, Left to right:

The bear claw print is used by native cultures as an omen of good luck.

The second square has to do with an otherworldly encounter I had feeding sparrows with a stranger in Paris in November 2000. I was traveling with one of the best companions that ever accompanied me on a trip, Timothy Findley’s book Pilgrim. Art completely imitated life as happenings in the story began to be the happenings around me. Sentences like, “We are not free to choose what attracts our attention. It chooses us. This way, I have been chosen by you” and “Divide the human population in two, Pilgrim would write of another encounter, and there you have them, the millions who never connect” jumped right out of the page and shadowed me wherever I went. Amazingly enough, I got to meet Timothy Findley a few months before he died. I brought my raggedy country swept copy of Pilgrim hoping he would sign it for me. I told him of my encounter and how it mimicked what happened in the book. He was thrilled and told me the story of how that particular passage came to be (as he wrote most of Pilgrim at his estate in France), and signed my book, “For Marjorie, with mutual memories of the Sparrows of Paris! Be well.” Indeed, “For the sake of having a memento of our encounter.” Touché Mr. Findley, how I miss your voice! The picture is really an embodiment of the stranger (Annie Dillard writes, “As a stranger is the friend of another stranger on account of their strangeness on earth.”) Touché again!

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Hanging 3 – untitled