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I first traveled across southern Ontario about twenty five years ago, driving through from New York to Toronto to claim my "Landed Immigrant" papers after I was accepted by Canada as an "Economic Immigrant." My post-graduate degree in the clinical sciences, and my proficiency in three languages (English, French and my native country's Amharic, and reasonable proficiency in Spanish from my doctoral research work which took me to rural Mexico for two years), as well as my world travel (residency in France, England, the United States, Mexico, and as a young girl in Ethiopia), had made me into a valued "immigrant." And it helped that I was from a "multicultural" (i.e. Third World, non-White) background, the strategy for accepting immigrants that the post-Pierre Trudeau Canada was following.
Ever since those first days of my introduction to Canada through my fortuitous route, traveling through the beautiful farmland and small towns of Ontario, driving alongside the great Lake Ontario, almost all the way from Niagara Falls to Toronto, I was left with a deep-seated desire to become Canadian, and to belong to this landscape that impressed upon me these images of this new, and exotic land.
I got a job as an immigrant counsellor, not through my own efforts, but through a friend of a friend of a friend who happened to know of the position, sure that I would be ideal in assisting "new comers" to integrate into their new country. But I failed. I failed to implement my own programs of my own standards. Non-Canadians, more precisely, non-Western non-Canadians do not want to become Canadian. In fact to be Canadian was a pejorative condition. They preferred to remain the honorable "other," which Canadians themselves encouraged, and innocently cherished. Who wanted to be a bland, white bread Canadian when one could be an Indian, or an Ethiopian, or a Mexican?
This sustained brainwashing became apparent as I pursued photography and textile design, and the arts in general, for which I had shown some aptitude when young. But the visual arts were taken over by postmodernists and multiculturalists, a dangerous combination, which stifle and destroy creativity. Artists weren't required to study the basics of the basics, but to immerse themselves in ideology and propaganda. My textile design teacher couldn't draw! I found that extraordinary. Eventually, I left these programs without any degree. I had accumulated enough anyway over the years. And I wasn't easily stunned anymore into academic submission to secure an insecure meal ticket.
I resumed a job back with immigrants, this time teaching English. It was during these years that I decided to go to night school to study painting, drawing and illustration. The teachers at these "night schools" were skilled and talented. They knew the rudimentaries. But they had been discarded by the art world, which sought dramatic impostors rather than accomplished artists. They kept the vigil in their secondary-school art classrooms, or the backroom workshop of museums. I learned landscape, figure and portrait drawing, and the most challenging: botanical drawing, where precision is paramount. Botanical drawings were the traditional methods for scientific journals and books to illustrate plants and flowers, before the advent of photography. I wish I had known this during my undergraduate botany classes. What a lot of time, energy, money and anguish I would have saved!
It was during these classes that the teachers, who understood the importance of representation, naturally guided us to represent our surroundings. And I found once again those Ontario landscapes that I had first seen during my journey to my new home.
Ontario doesn't have the dramatic mountains of British Columbia and Alberta, the endlessly shimmering prairie fields of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, nor the clear blue coast lines of the Atlantic provinces. But we do have lakes. Lakes in every corner. Small lakes and big lakes. Lakes that should be oceans. Hidden lakes for idyllic summer days. Lakes by gentle hills. Lakes surrounded by trees. Lakes that ship cargo vessels to towns and cities.
And in these paintings, I modestly try to revive and give life to these lakes. I think I have succeed.