The images below are selected paintings from the exhibition and book, John Hartman: Many Lives Mark This Place. The writing that accompanies these images are short excerpts from the essays written by each author about the place depicted in their portrait.
ESI EDUGYAN
"So many lives mark this place. When I do look out at the lighthouse, I see all these past joys and losses, the strangeness of lives so different from the one I share with my husband and my children on the very same shores."
Esi Edugyan, Victoria, 48" x 54"
IAN BROWN
"The white cottage at the mouth of Go Home Bay was the first place I ever rented on Georgian Bay. I was in my early forties, the breaking point in a man's life, and the cottage satisfied several requirements: it was spare, beautiful, and on a lively and changeable body of water"
Ian Brown above Go Home Bay, 60" x 66"
“It didn’t start with a book and a big exhibition, it all just started with a painting of David Macfarlane” – JH
DAVID MACFARLANE
"My father was frugal. He was an eye doctor, the son of a Hamilton ear, nose, and throat man. So we were comfortable. We were secure. Compared to the vast majority of the earth's population, we were wealthy. But this (I am embarrassed to admit) was not obvious to me - mostly because my father was so careful about money. Our not-all-that-big house was draughty in winter and, for most of my growing up, not air-conditioned in summer. My hockey shin pads were magazines held in place by elastic bands. My father was past forty before he conceded to a car salesman, finally, and agreed to pay extra for a radio.
A swimming pool was the last thing we expected. It was completely out of character for my father."
David Macfarlane above Hamilton, 60" x 66"
CARLEIGH BAKER
"Seeing my image painted over New Brighton Park creates another kind of dissonance. In a way, it presents the idea that I have some kind of claim to the land. I don't. I am a guest in this unceded place."
Carleigh Baker above New Brighton Park, 60" x 66"
“I don’t know how individuals composed their essays, and perhaps that’s part of the mystery of writing. But I painted almost all the portraits in this exhibition in that sideways shining northern light: hard, bright, unforgiving. In fact, it is the light I seek in all my paintings.” – JH
GEORGE ELLIOT CLARKE
"It's where John Milton and Nat Turner, Bob Dylan and Bessie Smith all infused my imagination with Biblical, bluesy ballads, as a teen poet, composing verses try-ing to unite apocalyptic sermonizin', trains braying or baying through the night, plus gals smellin' of molasses and kisses full of rum."
George Elliot Clarke above Three Mile Plains, 60" x 66"
NEIL BISSOONDATH
"The park itself, bucolic in every season and unsullied by commerce, emerges at the base of the forested cliff. The lawns, paths, and beach that summon summer picnickers, walkers, and joggers give way to a cliché of colours in fall and then to a fantasy of snow and ice in winter, dry-docked sailboats replaced by a Coast Guard icebreaker clearing a channel for cargo ships. Thanks to the alchemy of light on water and the mischievousness of clouds, the beach is like a chameleon - one thing at one moment, another thing minutes later."
Neil Bissoondath beside the St. Lawrence River, 40" x 46"
“In my studio, near Lafontaine, Ontario, I had to figure out how to combine the images of the writers with the landscapes of their choosing. This process could take a year, sometimes two, for each painting. It was often complicated” -JH
THOMAS KING
"We were on Long Beach once during a particularly low tide, had walked out across the flats to where the sand had been carved into deep valleys by the retreating water. We had started in sunshine, but were overtaken by a dense fog that had sneaked in behind us. We could hardly see beyond our hands, and, suddenly we found ourselves in an alien world, blind and lost.
A dark Mars."
Thomas King above Chesterman Beach, 66" x 60"
HEATHER O'NEILL
"This painting depicts a mural on Prince Arthur Street, which leads up to Saint-Louis Square, in Montreal. Growing up, it was the very heart of the neighbourhood known as the Plateau. The rents were ludicrously cheap, and the area was filled with artists and riff-raff. I spent a good portion of my youth living within a few blocks of this street. And all my happiest childhood memories took place somewhere near, if not on, it. Because of this area, I became hopelessly bohemian and measured every place in the world by the standards set for me here."
Heather O'Neill at Prince Arthur and De Bullion Streets, 60" x 66"
MICHAEL CRUMMEY
"This is Western Bay, on the north shore of Newfoundland's Conception Bay. When I was a youngster, my family used to come here to spend a week or so with my grandmother, in the house where my father was born and raised. People still kept livestock then; they cut hay and set gardens of potatoes and turnip and cabbage. I mooed at the cows and baaed at the sheep in the backyard fields."
Michael Crummey above Western Bay, 48" x 68"
Montreal Harbour, 2018, Oil on Linen, 48" x 68"
KATHLEEN WINTER
"A few months ago, developers put up a tent and invite locals in for miniature Angus burgers, beet and feta kebabbs, and tiny eclairs, while they used PowerPoint to explain forthcoming condos. We cleaned the developers right out of food - the lipstick lady and electric guitarists, myself and other bush-peeing, river traipsing residents. When they invited questions, someone wanted to know if there would be a cinema to replace the Palace Theatre lost many years ago. The developers seemed surprised, and did not know anything about a lost cinema. There might not be a cinema, they said, but there would be a small border of grass around the condos that all of us would be welcome, within reason, to enjoy"
Kathleen Winter above Verdun, 60" x 66"
DAVID BERGEN
"This was a town governed by a religious rigour that was consuming and hypocritical and pious. Beneath the piety roiled a conflict of desires - sexual, mercantile, heavenly. And I was part of the mess. And then, happily, I found a new shape - fiction - which required once again, as all faiths do, that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment."
David Bergen above the Rat and Red Rivers, 60" x 66"
LISA MOORE
"And then I am the hiss and flame of the propane lamp. There's no electricity, and the water comes from a well. There's a ring of stones where we buried the dog wrapped in my husband's favourite sweater, a note in the pocket. The last bubble floats above the lilac tree. My husband turns the dial on the propane lamp - the flame goes out and I am extinguished."
Lisa Moore above Broad Cove, 60" x 66"
Megan Gail Coles
"From Montreal, I wrote a letter. I begged my elders for the little biscuit box out on the point. I was twenty-five and penniless. I told them one day I would be neither and we would all wish after Nanny's sitting room then. What do you want that for, Meggie, they wondered aloud, worried that I was wading in over my boots. Me - their well-known and much-loved boot soaker. But they gave me my way. And Dad allowed me to foreman us into my thirties, tearing the tiny house back to her studs. Frantically gathering up small pockets of funds, progress always held up by my bank account."
Megan Coles above Savage Cove, 48" x 54"
DAVID ADAMS RICHARDS
"I have written about these people, the people who are part of this river, my entire life. My canon is, in one way or the other, a tribute to and a telling of them. They are part of the land, and the land is infused in them, just as the land of the steppe is in the mould of Gorky or Tolstoy. As one of my characters in Crimes against My Brother says, 'Human drama, and human greatness, unfolds wherever humans are."
David Adams Richards above the Bartibog and Miramichi Rivers, 66" x 60"
KATHERINE GOVIER
"There is an excellent loneliness in the Rockies. I feel it. Could rest my head in that cupped hand. We are all, somehow, alone here against the scale of the nearest mountain. We are always on a level halfway up, at a peak, or traversing a scree slope: It is how one meets the mountains and discovers one's smallness. It is restful to be so dominated.”
Katherine Govier above Mt. Rundle, 66" x 60"
GEORGE BOWERING
"The shade of the trees made wonderful respite when the sun's blaze went to three figures Fahrenheit. We boys took our shirts off when school let us out in late June, and we didn't put them back on till they made us return in September. Nobody's house or car had air conditioning, and neither did the stores and pool halls on the main drag, also known as Highway 97. It rained hard one July day every year, just in time to ruin the cherry crop, and again on a Sunday in September, so a guy could sleep in instead of picking apples all day."
George Bowering above Oliver, 66" x 60"
