Winnipeg, Canada

My 92-year-old Dad called a few hours ago to inform me that his 98-year-old brother Pete had passed on into the next dimension earlier this afternoon. Peter Jacob Peters (Uncle Pete to me and many others) will be remembered by his family as a joyous, poetic, green-thumbed patriarch; and to others as a truly remarkable and many-faceted “character” in the true sense of the word.

Peter J. Peters immigrated to Canada from the Ukraine with his family at age eleven (when my father was six). He took his schooling at Gretna in Southern Manitoba, and later enrolled in teacher training. At the outbreak of World War II, Pete enlisted in the RCAF—upon his eventual return from overseas service he attained his BSc. in Agriculture. Following graduation, he worked with the Extension Service of Manitoba Agriculture as a potato specialist (where he became known as “Potato Pete” to those in the field)—among other significant achievements he is credited with paving the way for the commercial potato industry in Manitoba. He also applied himself to the Strawberry Experimental Demonstration program at Hadashville in Eastern Manitoba, and as a direct result of his efforts, the Strawberry Growers Association of Manitoba came into being. Pete served as Secretary-Treasurer of the Manitoba Horticultural Association, was President of the Western Canadian Society for Horticulture, revitalized the periodical The Prairie Gardener, and wrote and published A Century of Horticulture in Manitoba. Aside from his horticultural pursuits, Pete was also a prolific poet (with too many published books to list here) and was active throughout his adult life in church and community activities, renowned for his entertaining hundreds with his photography-poetry-musical presentations.

Photo: Peter J. Peters in 1945 (while requisitioned to serve as a tri-lingual interpreter at the Nuremberg Trials after the war [on account of his fluency in Russian, German, and English]—a time he prefered not to speak about). Thanks to my brother Jim for the scan from an old photographic print.

Winnipeg, Canada

I’m pleased to announce that the book we designed* for my girlfriend entitled “Evelin Richter [mostly well behaved]” is now in print (40 pages, cloth-bound hard-cover).

Ev’s purpose in issuing this book is to increase exposure for her figurative sculptural ceramic work (her goal is not really to sell books). As she puts it, “While I love living and working in Winnipeg Beach, the reality is that a rural resort community that dwindles down to some 500 or so souls in wintertime simply does not have enough collectors or art buyers to put soup on the table—I’m hoping that the body of work shown in this book will help me to find gallery representation in some major urban centers… I welcome suggestions from friends and patrons in this regard.”

For anyone wishing to purchase an archival-quality hard-cover book, please let Ev know (send her an email here)… a batch of books will be available in time for Christmas giving.

•Thanks to my colleague Adrian Shum for doing the heavy lifting on the design/production!

Winnipeg Beach, Manitoba

Thanks to the many who came out to visit Evelin Richter’s studio ‘What Clay Art & Curios’ as part of the 10th Wave Artists’ Studio Tour over the past two days. The weather was outstanding and the exchange with visitors was stimulating. Among the guests who attended, my Circle colleague Adrian Shum decided to document his impressions photographically by means of his iPhone—view an online Flickr gallery of what he captured here.

Thanks Adrian!

Images: thumbnails from the Flickr gallery; the ‘What Clay Art & Curios’ studio, workshop, and Ev’s house as seen from the street; some of the completed sculptural pieces on display in the “workshop gallery;” “Piercings” jewelery pieces of Ev’s (on sterling silver chains); and the ‘Domestic Goddess’ weather-vane I made for Ev a few years back…

Gimli, Manitoba

This is an invitation for anyone in the Manitoba Interlake region to attend the vernisage of ‘the Lake’ art show at the New Iceland Heritage Museum in Gimli tomorrow (19:00-21:00 Friday, 25 March 2011). This exhibit (open until 6 May) is a precursor to the 10th WAVE Artists Studio Tour.

Image: my girlfriend Evelin Richter’s piece in the show, a ceramic sculpture entitled “On the surface, all seemed normal…”.

Winnipeg Beach, Manitoba

You know it’s winter when, quite suddenly, the tens of thousands of geese that have filled the skies for the past two months are gone… when the cats’ enthusiasm for the outdoors dies within a second of opening the door to their eager meows, and when the morning ritual includes an extra five minutes of sweeping snow off the car and scraping the windshield. Oh, there’s also the freezing temperatures of course, the monochrome palette that suddenly sets in… and other telltale signs such as overshoes by the door, snow-covered Westies parked all in a hibernating row, and ‘the greeters’ outside Ev’s studio sporting white toques and scarves.

I returned from a quick trip to Taiwan four days ago to find a complete change of season—not unexpected of course, but still a surprise…

Steinbach, Manitoba

Earlier this year, my recently-retired, older brother Ernest James Peters (Jim, aka Ernesto for the duration of the trip) went on a 13,000+ km, 45-day road trip with his brother-in-law Bob Banman (aka Roberto), driving down through 7 Central-American countries to the Panama Canal, where they were joined by their wives for the return trip. Jim has posted a click-through trip photo-album (produced in Picaboo, here) that I thought some of our far-flung relatives might enjoy.

I had posted several times about bro Jim’s road-trip exploits earlier—here, here, here, and here.

Steinbach, Manitoba

My aunt, Helen Reimer Eidse, passed on last week… I was among hundreds who attended her funeral here in Manitoba (while thousands more attended simultaneous commemorative services in various cities and communities in Congo, apparently). Having grown up on another continent, I do not, admittedly, know many of my relatives well (in no small part due to their sheer numbers)—Helen was one of my long-since-departed mother’s ten[!] siblings [eight sisters, two brothers])—though in retrospect, I do wish I had had the opportunity to know this fine woman better.

Helen Reimer graduated as a Registered Nurse in 1952, the same year she married Ben Eidse, a talented linguist (who would go on to learn nine languages and ultimately translate the Bible into Chokwe, a Bantu language spoken by nearly 1 million in central Africa, and today the lingua franca of eastern Angola). Fueled by faith-inspired passion to make a positive difference where it was most needed, she gave her heart and a lifetime of service to the people of Congo, where for decades she ran a dispensary, a tuberculosis ward, and a leprosarium (where she administered groundbreaking cures for leprosy in the 1970s), while also bearing and raising four daughters: Hope, Faith, Charity, and Grace (yes it’s true… my cousins).

Among accomplishments far too numerous to list here, she ended up directing a total of 24 clinics, solicited medicinal donations from major pharmaceutical companies for her African charges, delivered over 100 babies per year, and introduced a nutritious strain of multi-colored beans (initially as a single handful to help the lepers in her colony at Kamayala as a simple, practical means for them to grow a nutritious cash crop—and today reportedly selling by the tonnes and one of the most popular offerings in the produce markets of Kinshasha, sub-Saharan Africa’s second largest city [with a population of over 10 million], about 600km from the location of the legumes’ first introduction near the Angolan border)—these are now known across the western Congo as “Mama Eidse beans.” Small wonder then that she is known in that long-embattled country as “Congo’s Mother Theresa.”

After Helen and Ben returned to Steinbach “to retire,” her home became a haven for the elderly, the homeless, and numerous foster children. It’s said that Helen read the newspaper differently from other people, with an eye for those with hurting hearts and broken lives—she called and visited parents whose children had been arrested, driving them to court and sitting with them during trials, and becoming an advocate for “juvenile delinquents” who had no one else to support them. Frugal to the nth degree, this fine woman would reportedly put even the most dedicated of today’s dumpster-divers to shame when it comes to active recycling, re-using, and re-purposing for the benefit of have-nots.

In 1995, Helen suffered a major stroke that confined her to a wheelchair for the ensuing 15 years—though this could not stop her from the prolonged and attentive listening to, singing with, laughing with, and prayer with (and for) all she would encounter. (At the funeral, my aunt Grace Warkentin, Helen’s younger sister, confided that Helen had recently expressed that “she was good and ready to leave this ‘cage of a body’ at any time”)… to which I can only reply: May you fly free and high, with the wings of the angel you seemingly have always been!

Two days after the funeral, I was very pleased to finally spend several hours in heart-felt face-to-face conversation with my cousin Faith Eidse, who had come up from Florida for her mother’s funeral. I’ve posted about Faith previously here—(she’s an award-winning writer, among other accomplishments)—I thought it appropriate to share a short piece that Faith wrote for Rhubarb Magazine here that sets a suitable context for remembering her amazing mother Helen…

Stay good, Menno homies near and far…

Winnipeg, Canada

My 90-year-old father called me yesterday to tell me that he loved me—and that he had been thinking about and praying for me. I’m not sure I could describe the emotions this triggered… even if I tried.

Thanks, Dad.

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“You don’t have to deserve your mother’s love.
You have to deserve your father’s.
He’s more particular.”

—Robert Frost

Winnipeg, Canada

Thursday’s ‘Arts&Life’ section of the Winnipeg Free Press ran a full-page cover feature on one of Canada’s leading painters, Wanda Koop, highlighting her solo show which opens today at the Winnipeg Art Gallery (WAG). I’ve had the privilege and pleasure of becoming friends with and working with Wanda over the years (see samples of the identity design and print collateral materials we developed for her a few years back at Circle here) and I’m truly delighted at this opportunity she will have to showcase a lifetime of work.

Following is the text of the Free Press’ online article

by Alison Mayes (link here):

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Wanda Koop is so prolific, so constant in her art-making, that to mount a true retrospective of her distinguished four-decade career, the Winnipeg Art Gallery would have to lease practically all the exhibition space in town. That’s especially true when you consider that many of her paintings are enormous.

“Wanda could take over this building, the Manitoba Museum and maybe the Convention Centre,” jokes Mary Reid, WAG curator of contemporary art. “I’ve never seen anybody work at the level that she works at—flat out, all the time. It’s amazing that it all comes out of one person.”

Reid has been wrestling with the challenge of how to present the oeuvre of the internationally exhibited, senior Winnipeg artist in a major solo exhibition, organized in partnership with Ottawa’s National Gallery of Canada. The curator came to the conclusion that she couldn’t tell the 58-year-old Koop’s entire art story, so she would survey 25 years, from about 1983 to nearly the present. The result is an overwhelmingly varied, interconnected, multimedia exhibition titled Wanda Koop… On the Edge of Experience.

Trust us: it really is an experience. The much-anticipated show has a quiet opening Saturday, but its splashy opening will be Sept. 25, when the city throws its first Nuit Blanche all-night art celebration and the WAG stays open from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., with free admission. “It will give (viewers) hours and hours to look at things,” says Koop, describing the show as “almost a kaleidoscope of information.”

The show is on view here until Nov. 21. It will be shown at the National Gallery—which has Koop works in its collection, but has never presented a solo Koop show—from Feb. 18 to May 15, 2011, coinciding with the Prairie Scene art festival. A national tour will follow.

The exhibition is a significant honour for the Elmwood product, a daughter of Russian Mennonite immigrants whose childhood talent was nurtured at WAG Saturday-morning art classes, and who first had work shown at the WAG at age 19. “It’s not that often that women artists in Canada get to have what I’m getting—especially when they’re still alive,” says the world-travelled painter and video artist.

WAG director Stephen Borys notes that Koop graced the cover of the inaugural issue of Canadian Art magazine in 1984. “She could have prospered in any city, in any country, but she’s stayed in Winnipeg,” he says.

A number of Koop’s key paintings on plywood are to hang in lobby spaces at the WAG. The gallery space displays huge canvases from important past shows, some of them landscapes superimposed with technological symbols, for a total of 26 large-scale paintings. There are also monitors showing Koop’s video works, and countless other paintings.

One of Reid’s challenges was that so many of Koop’s past achievements were large installations—shows in which the entire gallery space was designed as an immersive environment. Here, the viewer gets to time-travel and see these installations in miniature, thanks to Koop’s partner, Stephen Hunter, who has meticulously crafted 16 maquettes—architecture-style tabletop models—of past shows.

These environments are complete with teeny gallery-goers—simple black, genderless figures—and mini reproductions of the real works. The viewer can play a sort of “Where’s Waldo?” game, says Koop, by spotting which full-size paintings link up with miniature ones, as well as by discovering connections between early sketches, preliminary paintings, and various versions of the paintings.

For instance, Koop has repeatedly painted Native Fires, based on seeing aboriginal people gathered around open fires near The Forks. In the very large version hung in the show, the orange fires are abstracted into teardrop shapes. “She distils images down to their most powerful essence,” says Reid.

Part of the show strives to recreate the flavour of Koop’s studio. On table after table, sketchbooks, notes, drawings, collected photographs, ephemera and even gunked-up paintbrushes are displayed. This “studio environment” provides insight into Koop’s process and the amount of investigation that goes into the major paintings. “These large-scale canvases just don’t appear out of nowhere,” says Reid. “I think of myself as a visual-language researcher,” adds Koop.

One table is covered with hundreds of jumbled Post-it Notes, on which Koop compulsively sketched while watching CNN coverage of the Iraq war. The overarching theme of Koop’s career has been examining how modes of technology affect nature. In the show’s final gallery space, her new installation piece Hybrid Human is the climax of the show. It’s a collaborative work that combines Koop’s paintings, video projections, a group dance piece by Winnipeg choreographer Jolene Bailie, a sound piece by Susan Chafe and lighting design by Hugh Conacher.

An enormous video projection of Bailie, resembling a black silhouette like the tiny people in the maquettes, will be installed after the dance component premieres at Nuit Blanche. Hybrid Human explores, in part, robots and artificial life. Reid notes that for Koop, “a painting is a type of screen that holds the potential to morph into a mirror.” Four huge Koop paintings each depict a tiny human figure contemplating a vast screen. In a fifth painting, the human is missing. As you stand in a rectangle of light, “You won’t know if you’re looking at a painting, or you ARE the painting,” the artist says.

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Photo: Wanda Koop with a piece from Hybrid Human, part of a solo exhibition opening 11 September at the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

Davos, Switzerland

My brother Phil (together with his über-energetic wife Tammy) has just completed the highest high altitude marathon in Europe—the gruelingly beautiful 42.2 km Swiss Alpine Marathon. The pair ran side by side from start to finish along a demanding route, partially on rough mountain trails, with a total ascent of 1890 meters and a descent of 1710 meters. A record number of participants (5910 entrants) and stellar weather helped make the event an unforgettable experience. More information about the race here.

Congratulations, you two!