In 2005 the
Ottawa Art Gallery toured my Railway Lands show to the Southern Alberta Art
Gallery (SAAG), in Lethbridge, Alberta.
As an artist
you never know when you go to a new place if the people you meet will be
pleasant and supportive, or indifferent and patronizing. No matter how
accomplished you are as artist, you are from time to time at the mercy of
directors or curators who believe they're doing you a favour by showing your
work.
With that in
mind and with some hesitation, I flew out to Lethbridge, Alberta to install
Railway Lands at The Southern Alberta Art Gallery. I didn’t know
anyone from SAAG, just names from letters and emails. I got into the
arrivals area in Lethbridge airport and was on the look out for someone named
Jason. I scanned the room looking for an art gallery type, when a young man
with long curly blond hair stepped up to an old farmer standing next me and
asked him if he was Eric Walker? Jason was the
show preparator and a keen young guy. After sorting out the greeting, he drove
me to the Southern Alberta Art Gallery and introduced me to Joan Stebbins,
Marilyn Smith and the others in the gallery. Afterwards we walked around the
gallery and discussed how the art would be hung.
The flight from
Ottawa to Calgary and Lethbridge was a bit tiring so I was glad when Jason
drove me to my motel, The Village Inn, on the northeast corner of 4ht Avenue
South and Scenic. He drove there the long way to pass the motel’s sign on 4th.
“Look at that,” he said, pointing up at it. It read in big letters, SO ALTA ART
GALLERY PRESENTS GUNILLA JOSEPHSON AND ERIC WALKER. Now that’s first class, I
thought to my self. After checking
in I walked down Scenic Drive to a local liquor store, recommended by the motel
manager and bought myself a bottle of scotch.
Back in my room
I pulled the curtains and looked out onto the western horizon, with Scenic
Drive in the foreground and the sun beginning to set over the coulee. I poured
myself a glass of whiskey and sat there until the sun gradually blazed up
crimson and faded away. My face was red
the next morning from being magnified by the motel room window, but nobody at
SAAG noticed. I got to work with Jason laying out the works. Later that day
Joan Stebbins took me to the Penny Coffee House to meet Gunilla Josephson and
her partner the novel writer Lewis Desoto.
Gunilla and
Lewis were both pretty cool, dressers and cigarette smokers. I learned Gunilla
and Joan were good friends from way back and Gunilla didn’t hesitate to tell
Joan how much she disliked the Village Inn, a come down from the last time she
had shown at the Southern Alberta. Later that day,
I once again sat at the table in my room at the Village Inn with a glass,
watching the traffic passing by on Scenic in the red glare of another blinding
sunset. It would be three more days before Penny came out.
It is a two
hour time difference from Ottawa to Lethbridge, so I was still getting up
early. I recall drinking tea, looking out the bathroom window to the reddening
eastern horizon and listening to the early news on a Calgary TV station. My
morning routine began with a walk over to the Tim Hortons for coffee, then down
the street to a pancake house for breakfast, where the service was pretty good,
friendly people. From the pancake house I made my way up to the Penny for a
better coffee and a newspaper. I had time to kill before the folks at SAAG got
to work, so after coffee I would wonder around Lethbridge taking pictures. One evening,
after my daily visit to the gallery, Jason took me to a club somewhere around 2nd
Avenue. It was a pretty cool place, grooving kids, a bit shaggy and unkempt,
sweet jazzy music. Gunilla was there. She and I might have looked out of place
in such a joint, except we were visiting artists with Jason, a not
uncommon sight in Lethbridge.
It had been
arranged beforehand that I would make a presentation, but I only discovered on
the day, it was to be in an Art Now type seminar class at Lethbridge
University. I prepared a text and slides in advance, so I was prepared, but
instead of speaking to 20 art students, this was a general arts course of 200.
I was warned beforehand that at 12 sharp most of the people would get up and
leave. And so it was. I stopped my presentation at noon; big round of applause,
then asked the actual art students who stayed around, to come down to the stage
for a more intimate talk.
After another
blazing, irradiating, sunset over Lethbridge and the solitude of my hotel room,
Jason and I went out to the airport next morning to pick up Penny. Penny
noticed right away that my face was sun burned. Indefatigable as a host, Jason
drove us around Lethbridge then into the coulee to see the historic Indian
battle site and the base of the famous CP Bridge over the Old Man River.
That evening
Joan and Luke Stebbins had a dinner party at their house on the west side of
the coulee, for Gunilla and Lewis and Penny and I. Marilyn Smith and her
partner Darryl also attended. Joan and Luke’s beautiful modern home was built
into the top of the coulee and had a fabulous view to the south and east. The
house was filled with art, all very tasteful and chosen with care. I asked
Luke, a noted biology professor at the University of Lethbridge about the
wildlife in the coulee. He told me he occasionally took a gun down into the
coulee while walking his dog because of the coyotes, but otherwise not much
other than rabbits, snakes and rodents. I remember
dinner was a beautiful planked salmon Luke cooked, with a sprightly green salad,
very good BC wine and a sorbet to finish. There was much good conversation and
I got a little tipsy. Nothing obvious, but the latter part of the party is a
bit of a blur. We drove back to the Village Inn with Gunilla and Lewis.
It seems to me
the opening was the next evening, but I may be wrong. Anyway, before the event
we all gathered, artists, loved ones and gallery staff for a big dinner at a
Chinese restaurant called the Regent. The dinner was lively and deluxe in every
respect. The Schezuan beef was particularly memorable.
The opening
itself was very pleasant, a good turnout, lots to see with my work in the
Carnegie space and Gunilla’s multi media work down stairs in the new gallery. I
remember I chatted with David Hoffos for a while. Later that
evening we moved on to another opening at a private gallery nearby. The work
was pretty interesting and the place was packed with local art students and
teachers, some who had been at my opening, others I didn’t recognize. Once
again Gunilla and I were treated with much deference. One of the exhibiting
artists, a young woman, who perhaps had too much to drink, kissed me.
Next morning
Penny and I picked up a rent a car and set off on a road trip to Waterton
National Park. Waterton National Park is a joint US/Canada park, called Glacier
National Park in the United States and quite unique. Our road trip took us out
of the prairie, into the foothills, right to the base of the Rockies, where the
little tourist town of Waterton sits on a long lake, which reaches into
Montana. On the way in we saw a bear cub on the road. Penny stopped the car and
we waited until the cub moved along, knowing that momma bear was somewhere
nearby watching.
Waterton was
just shutting down for the season when we got there. We noted the Shining type
hotel resort on the hill, the tiny RCMP detachment office done up as a log
cabin, the last chance gas station and the comprehensive tourist lodge with
cabins opening up on the rocky lake shore. The wind was up and the beach was
empty. We stood around watching the chop on the lake, cold in the glaring sun. After a lunch
of hamburgers and fries at the lodge, we drove further into the park to the falls
and Red Rock Canyon. I’d never been to a canyon before, so it sounded cool,
like in a cowboy movie. As it turned out Red Rock Canyon was pretty narrow, but
curious and geological with stratified reddish sandstone. The real canyons I
later realized were along the road to
the park where the foothills drop off at the base of the mountains.
Everything
I saw that day was startling and beautiful. As a snobbish Nova Scotian I had no
impression at all about Alberta and the Rockies and didn’t care. I left Waterton
Park and Southern Alberta with an indelible love for the magnificent and
sublime landscape I saw there. Fulfilling his final duty Jason drove
Penny and I to Lethbridge Airport the next morning, where we flew away in the
cloudless sky to Calgary and home.
