Painter JoEllen Brydon’s latest art show gives viewers a glimpse into a life well lived at her home in the small village of Mount Pleasant in Cavan Monaghan Township.
“Home” is a love letter to the house in which Brydon has spent the last 40 years raising her children and grandchildren, crafting her oil and acrylic paintings, and building her professional art career.
The exhibit is on now until Sunday, October 29th at the Atelier Ludmila Gallery, located at 129-1/2 Hunter Street West in the Commerce Building in downtown Peterborough. The gallery is open from noon to 4 p.m. on weekends and by appointment during the week.
Though this is the first time Brydon has used her home as the theme for an exhibit, the professional artist explains it’s not the first time her work has been influenced by her 153-year-old house and the acre lot on which it sits.
“It’s an old house and it’s got lots of character,” she says. “I’ve always found that it tends to inspire me and shows up a lot in my work. I never do an exact image of something, but the feel of what’s going on is in all of the pieces.”
In 1983, after spending six months searching the region for a house to buy, Brydon accidentally stumbled upon the home two months before she purchased it. The first time she saw it, she knew it was hers — even though it wasn’t for sale at the time.
“We were just driving around everywhere looking for a house and then I saw this one and said ‘That’s the house I want’,” she recalls, noting that she still can’t pinpoint what exactly appealed to her so immediately. “I just knew it was mine from the very beginning.”
Calling the experience “magical,” it’s almost as though Brydon willed the house to be put on the market. In July of that year, she was spending the first night in her new home. Since then, the house has “evolved” as she’s turned it into a home, planting trees and gardens, adding pets, and raising two children who have since given her grandchildren.
This summer, when Brydon’s 40-year anniversary of purchasing her home collided with the time she was preparing for her show at the gallery, she began to notice just how much her home had become a theme in many of her pieces.
“When I started working on this, there wasn’t a specific theme,” Brydon explains. “But as I went along, I suddenly realized most of the paintings in this show reflect this house and my family here, and the things that I’m familiar with.”
Exploring her own stories for the 15 pieces that are part of “Home” was a different experience for the artist, as much of her regular work involves telling other people’s stories as they’re relayed to her.
Specifically, her work often depicts stories from her relatives and their history. In the 1920s, Brydon’s family emigrated with a “whole gaggle” of brothers and sisters from a small farming community called Sixmilecross in Northern Ireland’s County Tyrone. They brought with them a love for the tradition of storytelling, which has been passed down to Brydon.
“They all had this real spirit and storytelling nature,” she explains. “They were always joking or gossiping. And that really came through the family and rubbed off on my mother and then me. To them, a story or a tale was the most important thing.”
With Brydon painting portraits of people and places since the mid-1980s, storytelling has become a central aspect in her vibrant acrylic and oil paintings as well. Oftentimes, she’ll even pen the story, told in a few lines scribbled somewhere on the painting itself or as a descriptive title.
“Most of the things I’ve painted are based on stories — I listen to people,” says Brydon. “I don’t necessarily experience the story, but they’re always telling it so I’m always listening.”
Much of the work that’s been inspired by her relatives’ stories can be purchased internationally at the Nicholas Gallery in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where she has been presenting her work since the early 2000s.
While many of the pieces currently showcasing at Brydon’s Atelier Ludmila Gallery show explore the more mundane moments of life — chopping wood, waiting in line, taking a bath — the artist explains that as a “nostalgic person,” her work also often unintentionally depicts characters using items that could seemingly be called “outdated,” such as rotary phones, televisions with antennas, and print newspapers.
“The paintings are documents of a culture in history,” the artist explains. “I’ve always been focused on things we’re losing — the things I see slipping by.”
History is often a component of Brydon’s work, most evident through her previous two large-scale installations that depict the Romani visit to Peterborough in 1909 (when 60 Roma set up camp on an extension of George Street and thousands of people came to watch them) and John Smith’s tragic attempt to paddle his canoe from Peterborough, Ontario to Peterborough, England.
Both installations relied on news coverage during the time period, in addition to Brydon’s research gathered from existing diaries and by listening to stories from community members.
Brydon is further exploring her own familial histories by working on a third mixed-media installation based on the compilation of work by her late mother Jean Armstrong Brydon when she wrote an advice column under the pen name Elizabeth Thompson for Toronto’s Globe and Mail from 1966 to 1978.
As for her individual paintings, Brydon has been showing them at the Atelier Ludmila Gallery for four years. Her current show “Home” is running until Sunday, October 29th, with pieces selling fast.
For more information about the exhibit or to make an appointment to visit the gallery, contact Laurel Pluck at gallery@ludmilagallery.ca or visit ludmilagallery.ca. For updates on which pieces have already been sold, visit Atelier Ludmila Gallery on Facebook.
More of Brydon’s work can be viewed at www.joellenbrydon.com or by following her on Facebook.
