I have always wanted to become an artist. I have always painted and drawn and can still remember the first landscape I painted. My Grade one teacher hung it on the classroom door. I used a palette of orange, green and indigo blue which I later learned are complimentary colours. I was a space cadet as a kid, always the outsider looking in. I loved to play with the treasures my parents had brought from Czechoslovakia, after the war. I could stare at these objects for hours, the figurines, the hand painted teacups, the ornate designs in the silver cigarette case, the crystal vases embossed with classic nude figures.

 

My father was a tailor by profession; he worked in ladies coats and suits in the art deco Hermes building on Peel street. He would bring home fabrics from Italy, England and France and would make me, my sister and my mother these one-of-a-kind coats. His profession had saved his life in Siberia since clothing and food were more valuable than money or jewels during the war. Once, I had him design me a Humphrey Bogart 30’s style coat that made me look like a Russian immigrée.

 

His Siberian stories, the clothing factory where he worked, the memorabilia from the other side of the ocean, the old country that European connection inspired me.

 

When I paint, I draw from that collective memory of stories, places and objects that all have an inner life. They are imbued with that inner kid in me that loved to play with paint and see the image appear, as if by magic. The every day theatre of life.

 

I love to find the extraordinary in the ordinary whatever is in front of me a studio chair light shimmering through a dirty window the shadow of a staircase on the garbage below a coat rack with a pile of coats 

squished up against each other -shades of the people that inhabit them huddled in the wintery wet streets a bowl of fake fruit lit by a studio lamp that reminds you of an interior elsewhere a wash of orange and blue that echoes the ocean a strand of yellow paint that reminds you of a sunlit room a sitting figure that seems fixed in time and space contemplating some secret that will always be a mystery to you, though you have somehow sketched them in a few rapid strokes.

 

Matisse could paint an interior view with a window and we are in that room with him, where subject and object and paint all merge into an ongoing present. It never ceases to fascinate me.

 

Anna Gedalof