Maud Lewis book to showcase ‘joyful’ artwork
Posted Jul 9, 2019 01:10:00 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
When she was alive, Nova Scotia folk artist Maud Lewis sold her paintings for a dollar or two, but now, her paintings are worth tens of thousands of dollars.
It's those paintings that are the focus of a new book called 'Maud Lewis: Paintings for Sale.'
Author and curator of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection gallery in Ontario Sarah Milroy tells NEWS 95.7 so many books have been written about Maud's life that the focus on this publication is more on having people appreciate her work.
“What we wanted to really do is to get people a little bit off the life story, and more on to looking at the way she makes paintings, to kind of really focus us back on how she puts the work together,” explains Milroy. “She's like a figure like Emily Carr where the life story has kind of taken over, and when that happens, and people become that kind of national treasure, on the one side it's great because their name is immortalized, on the other side it can mean people don't really look, and we really wanted people to look.”
Milroy describes the show's accompanying book is less about her troubled life and more about her determination to focus on joy in her work.
“She just prevails, and I think it's that discipline of happiness that she exemplifies that she just decided what she was going to think about, and what she was going to look at, and pay attention to, and she just stuck to these memories of her childhood that just gave her so much joy,” says Milroy. “And I think that's the word that really is synonymous with Maud Lewis.”
Lewis' work can also be seen in Halifax at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.
