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| Cross Canada Art Caravan with Holly Friesen |
12/5/2012 - I have driven across Canada many times over the years, by van, on the back of a motorcycle, on my own motorcyle, by yellow camero (contracted by a car dealer) by various other vehicles and finally by train. I haven't done it in a long time and so when a friend of mine said she needed her van driven out West I couldn't resist. My daughter, whom I haven't seen in almost a year lives out there and this was the clincher for me.
The trip has expanded. At first I thought I would bring a few paintings out west & explore the western art galleries. In the meantime I started to have requests from people along the route to see my work and so the road trip has become a series of one day/evening "pop up galleries" along the way.
Here is a link to my itinerary and online gallery of the paintings that will be accompanying me: http://hollyfriesen.prosite.com/42485/809648/artwork/cross-canada-caravan-paintings
If you are reading this and are interested in having me stop by your town for either a private viewing of the work or hosting a pop up exhibition please contact me for details.
As the project grew so did my passion for the trip. I love the diverse landscape of Canada, the boreal forests, the lakes, mountains, prairies, rivers. I won't have time to paint along the way this time but I will be taking photos, making sketches and absorbing the depth and breadth of the landscape. I will do my best to make regular entries on this blog as I travel.
On reading Thomas Berry's "The Dream of the Earth" I came across this passage that expressed my deep love for the wilderness and it's threatened destruction.
"We should be clear about what happens when we destroy the living forms of this planet. The first consequence is that we destroy modes of divine presence. If we have a wonderful sense of the divine, it is because we live amid such awesome magnificence. If we have refinement of emotion and sensitivity, it is because of the delicacy, the fragrance, the indescribable beauty of song and music and rhythmic movement in the world about us."
It is a ferocious love of these multidimensional expressions of the earth that I paint from, for and with.
As the physicist, Brain Swimme tells us, "The universe shivers with wonder in the depths of the human. From the tiniest fragment of matter to the grand sweep of the galactic systems, we have a new clarity through our empirical modes of knowing. We experience an identity with the entire cosmic order within our own beings."
And so I begin my cross country caravan, to share my own inner wilderness as expressed through paint. In turn I hope I will hear this interior wildness speak through others as we remember our capacity for the awesome, the sacred qualities of each bio region and to give gratitude for the numinous quality of every earthly reality.
A percentage of all sales along the road will be donated to the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society
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