Ottawa

Ottawa, located on the border of Ontario/Quebec, is a city with a European feel. Parliament is built on the cliffs near the river and is made up of grand stone buildings laid out in a manner resembling a campus. The street and shops signs are written in English and French and we heard both languages equally represented by store employees, gallery guards and people on the street.

J and I drove to Ottawa on Tuesday to visit the National Gallery and were greeted by a giant sculpture of a spider, “Maman”.



The museum is a modern structure with a wall of glass on one side to allow light to flood the long ramp leading up to the galleries. My original intent was to see the collection of Impressionist paintings but I ended up spending more time with the special exhibits and native collections, including paintings and sculptures done by Canadian artists.

While walking through the Canadian galleries I found myself trying to remember the artist depicted in Susan Veerland's novel The Forest Lover. I stopped in front of a written introduction to the Group of Seven, seven male artists who worked to bring the various art forms to the native tribes to the general population in Canada. At the bottom was a reference to Emily Carr, the subject of Veerland's book.

Excited, I exclaimed something (or other) out loud that caught the attention of one the museum's guards. He asked if I was enjoying my visit to the museum and if there was anything specific I had come to see. When I explained that I had been trying to remember Carr's name, he escorted me to the corner where two of her paintings hung, one from the period of time she spent in France. I was surprised to see that both were in oil (Veerland depicted her as mostly a watercolor artist) and very impressed at how familiar the guard was with the location of various works in the museum.

The two special exhibits we walked through were of works by Ron Mueck and Robert Davidson.

Ron Mueck creates incredibly realistic sculptures of humans, all scaled greater or lesser than life sized. J was enthralled by one of a giant man, sitting in a corner in a poise reminiscent of Rodin's “The Thinker”. My favorite was of an exhausted mother with a newborn infant on her deflated stomach, still attached together by the baby's umbilical cord.

Robert Davidson is a Haida artist and sculptor. Feeling that his work was becoming stale and recycled, he turned to studying tribal designs on bowls and other objects as inspiration to create a series of stylized, abstract paintings, carvings and sculptures.

Burned out on great art we decided to have a meal and walk around the city. I was unable to capture my favorite moment on film as the feeling of squeamishness at taking a photograph of a homeless man's possessions outweighed the sense of irony at reading his handwritten sign “On a break, back in fifteen minutes”. To earn money he would write a poem on any subject and I had no money for poetry that day.