Elizabeth Johnson says it was the Strada Easel challenge that got her painting gangbusters again this past winter.
“Every January, the Strada Easel company challenges international artists to do a painting from life every day and post it on social media,” Johnson told an audience at Pizza on Earth April 14.
Her exhibition this past Sunday featured 65 oil paintings done this year on location throughout Haliburton, Muskoka, and in particular, her village of Dorset.
It offered a glimpse into what winter in Algonquin Highlands is like. The event featured live music by pianist, Sarah Spring, and a talk from the plein air landscape painter.
Johnson said the victor of the challenge can win a free easel, and “there is always a shred of hope that I’ll win that fancy easel, even though the likelihood is nil.”
However, she said that’s not the reason she paints outside in winter.
“I paint in winter because it is quiet. We Johnsons have only two seasons; pizza season, and its extreme opposite – the quiet season.
“The conditions for painting are optimal; no bugs, no tourists, minimal schedules, silence, solitude, and tons of inspiring scenery, all to myself. The only inconvenience is that it is cold. But I have nicely solved that problem with the discovery of electric socks.”
She added that come November every year, she crams a year’s worth of painting into the non-pizza-making months.
She prefers doing so outside.
“At my boathouse studio at home, I find all kinds of excuses to stall painting. I am suddenly hungry, sleepy and preoccupied with domestic chores. Out in nature, everything has to happen quickly, the light or the weather can suddenly change. When the light changes, colour vanishes, shapes disappear and the mood can shift. Then, I am in trouble if I haven’t quickly established these elements right off the bat.”
Some days the inspiration is not there and Johnson said it’s time for a “verbal boot in the pants.” She puts on the coat her daughter discarded 20 years ago, perylene red ski pants, cadmium orange construction worker gloves, daisy-decorated rubber boots, a knobby-knitted wool hat that once “belonged to a Velma,” and a rejected Pizza on Earth apron.
She reckons she has three to five hours of painting before turning into a block of ice.
She prefers big brushes and sweeping, energetic strokes, “especially here in the north where everything is bulging with greatness: the towering white pines, the expanse of frozen lake, the soaring granite cliffs, the infinite quiet, punctuated occasionally by the reverberating ring of the head-banging woodpecker.”
She added last weekend, “I do not think of myself as an artist, no more than you are,” she said. “I am driven to do good work with my hands – winter and summer. Both are important. All of us have the job of making the world a little bit more pleasant and beautiful.”
