Salt Spring Island Archives
451_Briony Penn_Painted with Tea_Historical Talk-1__Nov 5_2022.mp3
otter.ai
03.2026
yes
Inara Wallace
Summary Keywords
family history, Nancy Braithwaite, Salt Spring Island, Maud Lilian Tyrwhitt Drake, Arts and Crafts movement, John Ruskin, colonialism, landscape influence, family archives, exhibiting paintings, intergenerational themes, naturalist tradition, sketch clubs, Indigenous relations, family legacy
Speakers
Talk Attendees, Ceridwen, Christina Marshall, Briony Penn
Ceridwen 00:00Briony Penn 00:08
oh yes, permission to record.
Ceridwen 00:10
Thank you. You can say whatever you want. You're in charge now.
Briony Penn 00:15
Oh, I'm in charge now. Okay.
Talk Attendee 01:03
[indiscernable crowd chatter]
Christina Marshall 01:49
We're going to start in just a couple of minutes. My name is Chris. I'm from the Salt Spring archives, from the Historical Society. I don't know how many of you are here from the Historical Society. I'm going to do a repeat of a confession I did last time I spoke about the calendar last time. I don't know if any of you have heard that, and if you did, I'm going to redo the punch line where I tell you that our calendar last year was a big seller. We sold 160 copies. It's our main fundraiser for the archives, and we made mistakes, so that when you get to the end of November and you gleefully turn to December, you'll find that the dates are wrong, we do them all by hand, or we did. We won't be doing that again, so you have to repopulate your own dates in December. And my punchline was, where else but on Salt Spring, courtesy of the archives, do you get to celebrate the holiday season twice. That said, we are working on a new calendar. We're gonna be a little bit late this year, but should be out towards the beginning of December, and those are available at Mouats, and...has a bookstore for us, and here at the library. And if you're Historical Society member, you can prepay and upload your copy. So that's the business of the day.
Christina Marshall 02:58
We're here to talk with Briony. First, I'd just like to acknowledge that we are all meeting here on this unceded territory, and unceded, of course, we've never given up territory here on Salt Spring Island, the Gulf Islands and surrounds. These are the traditional lands of the Hul’qumi’num and the SENĆOŦEN speaking peoples. They've been here for 1000s of years, and have stewarded these lands, and we have a lot to learn from them.
Christina Marshall 02:58
So Briony probably needs no introduction to you all, most of you, you're all community members, you'll know that Briony is a great friend of the community. She's an educator, both University and little ones, with groups and on walks and talks. She's an environmentalist. She's a conservationist. She's a writer. Several of her books, I can't remember all the names, Briony. There's a few cases out there, A Year on the Wild Side, the Following The Good River, The Real Thing, Canadian geography. That's a children's book, which is really great, and Stories From The Magic Canoe. And I'll encourage you, if you're going around the display afterwards, to have a look in the corner there. Briony's write up. There's a great little magical moment about the magic canoe. And also, obviously, you know, Briony is an illustrator too, so Briony is going to talk today about the six generations of her family and the legacy that they have here on Salt Spring Island and beyond.
Christina Marshall 02:58
And I encourage you, obviously, afterwards, to go around and take anything. And we'll, even when we finish, if everybody can put the chairs on the edges, can just scoop them in a little bit so there's room to go around. And please don't forget to look at the display piece up there. It's fantastic. It's like a little museum.
Briony Penn 11:07
Okay, thanks Chris! And thanks everybody for coming on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. So thank you for coming out. I'm just wondering if we should turn, Should we turn the lights...?
Talk Attendee 11:24
[indiscernable chatter]
Briony Penn 11:43
Yeah, that. I think, can everyone see that okay? So I just wanted to give a little background to to this exhibit. So many of you will remember my cousin Nancy Braithwaite, who died a year and a half ago, and she's my first cousin, once removed, my mom's first cousin, and my mom also, who passed away on Salt Spring in 2012 and the two of them were really my biggest, you know, guiding spirits in my family, very strong women with fairly deep seated principles and values about education and things like that. And Nancy left a lot of the family albums and sketchbooks of many sort of generations of my family. And so she's always been a really staunch supporter of the historical society and the archives.
Briony Penn 12:43
And I was talking to Chris one day, and I thought, this is the right appropriate place to put the this archive, so that the bulk of the archive, or the bulk of the collection, which is called the Nancy Braithwaite Rosemary Penn fond or collection, was my great grandmother, Maud. She was Maud Lilian Tyrwhitt-Drake, and then she married Arthur Weaver Bridgman, and spent, those of you know Bridgman road and down at Beaver point, that's kind of like the where the Bridgmans live, still do some of us.
Briony Penn 13:21
And so the idea for the, the show and this talk came when Chris said, well, let's, you know, this collection of paintings is going to the archives, but it doesn't get seen, so let's have a show of it. And then you said, well, let's have some other members of the family. And so it actually started a journey for myself. And I just want to introduce my cousin Nicola Nick William, Nicola Adelia. Her pen name, Nicola is a poet, and she's going to be speaking on November 26 she's written a chapbook of poems about Maud and please come if you want to hear Nicola's poems, and you can also read excerpts of them along these panels.
Briony Penn 14:10
And Nicola and I, and Chris, and Ceri. So Ceri is also with the archives, and I just can't say enough to thank you two for the support and fun that we've had putting this together so the four of us...[crowd clapping]. It was really, and what we realized too is that it really, there was many themes that came through, and it was really for I know, for Nicola and I was quite a dive into our family, which we've always kind of thought we knew, but it gave us a real excuse for a deeper dive and to kind of explore history through the lens of different generations, and there are artists, there have been artists in my family, stretching back more than you know. They go back and back.
Briony Penn 15:08
I didn't, I didn't take anyone back further, but, except that a really interesting thing happened today, but I'll save that for the last slide. So then we were trying to think, Well, what should we call this exhibit? And one of the things that my partner had said to me is he was really struck by a comment one of the elders had said, saying that they were raised by the sea, as in, by the sea, as opposed to raised adjacent to the sea, and I realized that the role of the landscape on my family's consciousness has been so strong. We were, we were colonizers, like, like, I mean, awful colonizing family, because the family stretches back all the way to the Norman conquerors. And it seems to have you know that I was also raised with this notion that this family had this like, you know, genealogy and as history often just records the conquerors, wasn't really also recording the artists and the rebels of that sort of pattern, although we all benefited from the privilege that came with being in this sort of conquering family. So there was always conflict. And I know Nicole and I have always struggled with this sort of conflicting love-hate relationship with a family that has had both elements to it, but in fact, that is all the human families.
Briony Penn 16:50
So it just started this kind of dialog and, and I also thought, Well, how do I, how do I contextualize this for the six generations that that were really influenced by the island and this landscape, and you know. What were the influences on them as they arrived in this in this land? And so I'm going to kind of take you on this little intergenerational path.
Briony Penn 17:25
So this was a really fun exercise. I went and got because my family being what they are, they kept everything. So I have little paint pots that go back 150 years and the paints still in them. And so I took the pigment from the different generations paint pods, and I painted them in and it's subtle, but it actually speaks to some really interesting things, which is, if you look at right at the top, this is also a family tree, because I wanted to make the family tree not too complicated and kind of interesting and also themed on the idea of artists.
Briony Penn 18:04
So Montague William Tyrwhitt Drake is my great, great grandfather. He's born in 1830 and he was the one that left England and first came to British Columbia. What we called British Columbia, even before it was called British Columbia in around 1858. And he this so his paint, his paint kit, are all very much Earth hues. His daughter is Maud Lilian Tyrwhitt Drake. And I'll just point to the area of the room where these different people are. So that is Montague William Tyrwhitt Drake, over there. And you can see over here, those colors. They're really quite earth tone-ish, and that was his paint kit. Maud, is this, kind of this half of the wall here, Montague, mostly he was a sculptor, so he's mostly in the cabinet. This is my mom, Rosemary Maud Weaver Bridgeman, and this is her paint palette. And you can see the colors getting a little bit more vibrant, especially kind of post war. This is my paint palette, and I'm over there, and then Charlotte Rose is over there. This is my niece, and so this is the six generations I'm going to introduce you to and their paint kits.
Talk Attendee 19:39
How come you don't have a British name?
Briony Penn 19:44
My mom married Mr. Penn, so Maud Lilian Tyrwhitt Drake married a Mr. Bridgman and so on. That's I put people's birth names, not their married names. So. I'm going to start off with. So what happened was, I went back and I did...I was reading some of the things that my mom wrote. My mom was a teacher, she studied English literature. She was an, you know, very much, an educator in everything she did.
Briony Penn 20:14
She was very influenced by, because of her family, by The Arts and Crafts movement, and people like John Ruskin, the writings of John Ruskin, and so for those of you who don't know Ruskin's kind of philosophy, he's kind of fallen out of, I don't know how many people really read Ruskin anymore, but if you delve into Ruskin, I feel like he might have a bit of a revival. He was, he was many things. He was also a great bundle of contradictions, which I love the best about him. But he basically was an artist, a writer, a thinker, and he felt that everyone had, everybody, every single human being, had a right to beauty and access to nature, and that that was what was going to inform them and make life meaningful. And that should be as much available to the the working man as it was to the any, any, anybody in any walk of life, and that people should enjoy the work that they do, and that every child had a right to be well housed, clothed, fed and educated. And he was this beautiful artist that would paint beautiful scenes in nature, including just things like feathers. So I just put his feathers. He's got a very famous quote about feathers.
Briony Penn 21:40
So all through this talk, I littered his quotes. These are the quotes that I grew up with. And when I start looking them, I go, oh yeah. I mean, how you'll just see how interesting it is when you start seeing these parallels of Arts and Crafts movement. And for also, for those of you don't know about the Arts and Crafts movement, it covered quite a span, from about 1860 to sort of the arrival of the First World War and and it really was a reaction to industrialization. It was like people seeking more meaning in their life, more meaning in their work, a simpler life. These are all things that I think are going to be resonating to some of you today, and they and they were looking at they didn't like the globalization going on. They didn't like the way that materials weren't local materials anymore, that the architecture was not in response to the local environment, that the art was kind of going off on this strange, these strange tangents. And so it was really celebrating kind of the local and so,
Briony Penn 22:57
It started around 1860 and spanned all the way up. It's kind of a reaction to industrialization. So all the mills were arriving in the UK, and so people were kind of fleeing and setting up, sort of arts and crafts intentional communities. This might be sounding a little bit familiar, so just to say that, as there was a great historian on the CBC this morning, and he said, you know, historians will tell you that the two most constant, consistent responses they'll ever make is, it's probably happened before, and it's more complicated than you think. So that would apply to here. But certainly this is that that is the ethic that pervades Ruskin, that pervades people like William Morris, who, those of you know William Morris, or Charles Rennie Mackintosh. I'll show you. I'll get to them a minute.
Briony Penn 23:56
So I pulled up this photograph because Nancy had found this photograph in one of the albums, and she liked it. She said, this is, this is typical of your great, great granny or something, or your great aunt. These are, so this is my great granny and her children. These people on the beach are visitors from England, and this is my family. And I realized, Oh, my God, nothing has changed. Because I realized that I've always kind of presented this strange, eccentric image to people coming off the, you know, often off the mainland or somewhere. It's like, whoa, I don't know. And so I was going through Ruskin quotes, and this is one of his, you know, famous ones you'll find "the common practice of keeping up appearances with society is a mere selfish struggle of the vain, with the vain." So...part of, I think, what I'm developing a little bit, is a hypothesis about how Salt Spring and now the landscape and ideas like coming through the Arts and Crafts movement are both are, you know, Ruskin's idea, vision, was very...in keeping with a lot of world views about how land, you know, shapes our perceptions.
Talk Attendee 23:57
19, what year?
Briony Penn 24:08
This is a picture of my great granny, Maud. So she, I'll get into, more into her in a minute. But this is a quote that I remember from my childhood. The best things, oh, I didn't spell it right, "the best things in life aren't things." And so if the title, which was painted by the sea or 'raised by the sea, painted with tea' is another kind of play on the second phrase painted with tea, because she was like a classic, a classic settler, in many ways, keeping a lot of these British traditions, traditions of empire, obsession with drinking tea is one of them, but also other than kind of, some of the more you know, male elements, colonization.
Briony Penn 24:08
But the painting with tea is actually...a little scrawl that she had written on the back of her paintings, because she was always outside, always sketching, and she'd forgotten her water one day, so she just painted the whole thing with tea. And I thought just in that moment, it really struck me that, you know, it sort of embodies all the kind of conflicted emotions that I have about my family, about colonization, about who we are, how do artists live within these strange, conflicted societies that we find ourselves in. So that's that's Maud.
Briony Penn 24:08
Okay, so another one of the family influences that came out of the Arts and Crafts movement was Heywood Sumner. And Hayward Sumner was some kind of distant member of the family. I can't remember quite which one. I never asked my mother properly, and now I now never find out. He is an associate of William Morris. Those of you know all that, you still can find those little you know the strawberry thief, and there's little remnants of William Morris, but he was so much more to it. And if you read these journals, Hayward Sumner kind of was really anti industrialization, you know, really sad at the loss of all these old crafts and the old way of being in in some of these villages in England, as industrialization was just taking over. So he was out there. These are his journals. He's out there sketching, writing his little stories, "I dream of the secret violet, which will write to the sights, sounds and sense of Mother Earth."
Briony Penn 24:55
I mean, they were, you know, Pan psychist people, they really believed in, in the spirituality of Mother Earth. They were, they were romantics to some extent, but also kind of pragmatist too, because they saw the the loss of these really meaningful trades where people had a trade and they were in charge of their own, you know, lives. And then we're having to flee and go, you know, having to outstand out of these rural areas through industrialization. You know, no one was buying their handmade cart wheels anymore. So Cuckoo Hill [The Book of Gorley] was, you know, sort of part of my growing up. And one of the things that Sumner did is he made maps, and I realized, Oh, my God, I grew up with this map hanging in my, one very similar to this, anyway, in my kitchen, my mom had hung it up, and it was, you know, hand drawn map, and it was all these very cool little things like, you know, the pagan circles here, and Roman dwellings here, and, you know, hedge nests, whatever, all the sort of special landmarks of this, this part of the country, and the New Forest, which is still a very...
Briony Penn 29:41
Those of you been to the New Forest, it's still, it's actually retained a lot of its qualities, largely because there was such an emphasis on these kind of like trying to, you know, build value in, societally, into these, you know, elements of landscape, so another really important influence, this was, this had a huge influence on me, was Charles Rennie Mackintosh, but maybe you've seen this. You...if you go, you get postcards with this image on it. It's of the Fritillaria, which is the wild, we have a fritillaria wildflower, and I, and I always thought "our wildflower, someone has finally, like identified it as as beautiful in it's geometric beauty." because they're so unusual. These, these brown, incredible, you know, brown flowers with checkerboards on them. And this, the Fritillaria was probably the main root crop for the entire coast. Rice root is another name for it. And, you know, I fast forward my entire life, and I'm, you know, immersed in Hanaksiala (Indigenous) culture that rice root is the mainstay protein. So, Charles Rennie Macintosh was another big influence.
Briony Penn 31:03
Okay, so we're going to start with Montague. I love this picture because...Monty, the Tyrwhitt Drake's were, the Drake family goes...It's saying it goes back right to 10, 1066, and I have a family tree, which you can see in the cabinet. It literally goes back. I can trace 56 generations back to my great, you know, 56 greats. And it's always, I always think, should I, you know, when you sit in a circle and someone says, Can you name your grandparents, your great grandparents? And I often don't say it, but I feel like I say, I could say I can trace 56 generations, but they're all people that I think were like colonizing around the world, and they kept very good notes of themselves.
Briony Penn 32:00
And so I never know quite I'm always a bit ambivalent about saying that, but at the same time, you know what came out of it was this well educated person like this Montague William who's now influenced by people like John Ruskin, and he is fleeing his stately homes and his, you know, life as a younger son. He's like...how old was he when he left? I didn't put the dates up. 30...20 something. Yeah, he got his law degree, and then he was out of there. So this is him. I always called him hip, you know, Montague leaving home. He's like, of the gate and pow! And he, so he was trained in Law, and he arrives, he's gonna, he's gonna do his own thing.
Briony Penn 33:10
So he arrives via Panama, in California. This is, this is up near Fort Hope. And he keeps a journal. We don't have a lot of the journals, and one of our cousins, Guy Tyrwhitt Drake, who's sort of the last of the drakes that have kept the name. Guy has some of these sketches from Montague, but he there's not a lot of them. But I feel like it would have been fascinating to have had the full diary. Some of them have ended up in the British Museum. But the ones that you see here, the ones that we have, these are the originals that we have, and they they're curious. He's he's traveling along. He's in Fort Hope. He's got all the sort of colonial, patriarchal language of the time, but he's curious about these, these boxes up the tree, and you can read them when you after you see it and so. And he's got his little paint pot out, and here he is with his a bit dark. You can see it over there. The color didn't work really well. But here are the two. They're out gold mining, his pals. These are their tents, and, you know they're, I don't think he liked gold mining. He didn't last very long at it.
Briony Penn 34:30
And so he headed off to Victoria. And he's painting. He's keeping sketching along. And this is Victoria. He took it. He's taking photographs the same time he's or some of these are a little bit later than the paintings, but you can see the same kind of scene. Victoria is, you know, James Bay is, is still a wetland and a sort of estuary. And you can see the cathedral up on the top. This is the arrival of of the what's the HMS...Cormorant. Yes, couldn't read it on. This was the very first British naval ship coming to assert authority. You know, its naval presence. They're fighting, the Americans and the British were fighting those, those sort of boundary wars around the San Juans and everything. So this is the first British naval ship.
Briony Penn 35:33
And this is my great great grandfather, my great great grandmother with another couple just out in their canoe, touring around, going on a picnic. And that was, when you look at these photographs, there are an awful lot of picnics. Yeah, this is 1888 and this is about 1860. So there's, because he came out in 1859. Yeah, that's 1888 so anyway...some of the dates we don't know because they're not dated, where some, some of them were really guessing at. And you can see where we know the date we've put it, and often we're just guessing. Here we know it because it's 1881 this is up around Hope. Yeah, so this is right up in Hope. And this one, I don't think, this is in one of the scrapbooks. We don't have these shown here because they're bound into one of the scrapbook but there's a sort of interesting you can see this tree has been cut. There's a woman sitting here and a man's hat here. So I'm not sure what's going on, but that's that's also up in the Hope range.
Briony Penn 36:59
So Montague Tyrwhitt Drake trained as a lawyer. He worked he had a little law firm. He traveled around as much as he could, because he was also going out and helping clients here and there. He traveled all the way up to Sitka, Alaska to represent the sealing schooner captains when they were captured by the Americans, there was a big dispute over the sealing grounds. And so he was traveling around all the time and painted wherever he went. So some of these you'll see, there's the Desolation Sound, and you'll just see pictures of the West Coast. And he was very much, I would say, in that kind of naturalist tradition, you know, where you had, he just wanted to go out and sketch the landscape. It was very much his, his kind of passion. And there's a book. It's called...the book has been produced about him that's also in the cabinet, and more about him in a minute.
Briony Penn 38:09
But what, what was really interesting was, you know, that sort of conflict between wanting a simple life, wanting a freer life, wanting a meaningful life. This is his. We think this is wife and daughters and friends. And this is another Ruskin quote: "As the art of life is learned, it will be found at last that all lovely things are also necessary. A wild flower by the wayside, tended corn, wild birds and creatures of the forest, as well as the tended cattle, because man doth not live by bread alone." I think that one of the things that Nikolai found is there's just a lot of playfulness in these photographs.
Briony Penn 39:00
So this is his first, his first daughter was Maud, and this is Maud, one of Maud's little poems. And it's her on her horse. "Miss Drake went to riding one fine day, she jumped over a log. She fell down "plunk" and fell "fump". And this is the end of her [story]"...something. And this is, this is her painting as a young woman. And this isn't her, but this is one of her, her cousins, I think, because the age isn't right. But so the journals that we have, or the letters that we have is that these kids just ran wild around. They were just sort of everywhere. They were out sketching from an early age. They were riding their horses. They were sort of the, you know, the privileged daughters. But they certainly were opting for lives outside.
Briony Penn 39:59
This a really dark photograph, but I kind of like it. It's and I'll show...oh, I wonder if it...that's what happened. There's one of them didn't make it in, which is a shame. Something happened with it. Yeah, there's a, there's a photograph that, for some reason, didn't transfer, but it's, it's...all the names of a sketch club. And the Victoria sketch club really started in about the 1880s I would say. Not in name, it hadn't become the Victoria sketch club yet. But there was all these women, there was the Pembertons, there was the Creases. There was the Wards, the Tyrwhitt Drakes. And these were all young ladies of well to do, colonial families that were Sketchers.
Briony Penn 40:46
And amongst Skechers, eventually, was Emily Carr and so, and we, you know, we had little memories, like I have a memory, you know, I think you have a memory of how granny would say, Oh, they they thought Emily was bit odd and but they were all kind of a bit odd, because what they did is they would go off on these sketching expeditions as women together, and they just hung out. So I'll show you one in there. So here's one of their paintings. This is by Maud in 1895 and she just had her, had their tent, the Hudson's Bay blanket. And you can see how, why the conflict emerges because it's, you know, who, who were they? Were they you know, for us, we saw these images of these women, clearly loving the landscape.
Briony Penn 41:54
This is her. We don't know if she's holding a cup of tea or a thing of whiskey, but and then they would, they would just set up tables in the middle of nowhere and have picnics. And there are, this isn't an isolated event, and the photographs and the sketches are full of these things. This is some sketches by Sophie that's in one of their, one of their scrapbooks. This is Victoria in the old days. This is obviously a First Nations woman with her child. These women were recording what was going on, and there's some really, unfortunately, I don't know what happened, but some of the images didn't so I had to delete them, but I had some more by Sarah Crease, the beautiful ones of totem poles and all sorts of things. So they were, they were like Emily Carr didn't come from nowhere. She was very much part of a cohort of women, and she was, although she was considered eccentric within her group, she was really very much part of a movement that was highly influenced by people like Ruskin and and people like that.
Briony Penn 43:19
So here's one of the Ruskin quotes: "The more I think of it, the more I find this conclusion impressed upon me, that the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way." which to me, really spoke to Maud, because my mom, when she was writing about Maud, said that she had over 600 sketches of Mauds. Maud didn't paint for like she...wasn't a professional painter. She would never considered herself such. She was a mother. She raised three children. She, she was widowed early. She lived in the little cottage, what she called Lyoness Pooks Hill cottage, at Lyoness Beaver Point. And she must have painted the bay there 2-300 times. We have it in every light, every season, every dawn to dusk, you know, summer, winter, and she loved, she, you know, when she was painting in these, in these palettes, limited palette that she had, and her sketchbooks look like this. They're just little like that, and you just flip through them.
Briony Penn 44:37
So I just, I just, these are three of her, just three little sketches, just little tiny ones, and they're probably familiar to you. They're all, these are all Salt Spring. And I'll just go through some of the ones that are Salt Spring. This is another Ruskin quote "You never will love art well till you love what she mirrors better" And actually, this is kind of neat. This is the road to Cowichan Lake. This is up at TPC, which is on the west coast. She would get on the Mcquinnah, the boat the Mcquinnah, and she would just sail up the West Coast and paint. This is Baker, obviously from uplands. So what we have in this collection is scenes of the coast, from the Sierra Madres all the way to...you can see some of these here, Clayoquot. She just painted the coast. She just loved, she loved the coast. And then when she wasn't traveling, she was in Salt Spring painting Lyoness.
Briony Penn 45:46
So here they are. They were also really into these cameras, these little brownie cameras. And they're taking, and it's so interesting. The other thing that we realized is that the cameras in the hands of women produces photographs at the time, very different than the cameras in the hands of men at that time. So they were all kind of these goofy photographs, which you can see around they're just taking pictures of themselves fishing and knitting and hanging out. This is Burgoyne Bay. This is Xwaaqw'um. This is looking across to the Malahat. And this is her little cottage. I grew up both Nikola and I grew up staying in this cottage. And there was always these, you know, pictures by, pictures by granny were everywhere, and she was also Carver.
Briony Penn 46:41
So part of the Arts and Crafts movement was, you, you got skills in...like, what do you call it, traditional crafts? So she was a carver. So she carved, this is over the fireplace. It said "east, west, Hames best" and and these are all her paintings over. And so this is an under Ruskin quote: "We should be led as much to the street and the cottages to the temple and the tower, and she'll be more interested in buildings raised by feelings." that certainly influenced, that I certainly was. You know, it's very much guided my kind of, like, where, about where I want to live, and architecture and the an architecture of love, not, you know, profit. So this is, this is Kingfisher Cove. This is the most painted Cove in her collection. And today it's a little public area. There's about 50 canoes down there.
Briony Penn 47:55
So the other side of all this coin we'll be getting to it in a minute, is, is, this is also WENÁ,NEĆ. This is a village site. And well, so this is this picture taken about 1910 is their neighbors at the at the Fulford reserve. And I've got, we've recorded the names that were written for Charlie and Mary. We always knew them as not personally, but we would hear stories of Charlie Zalt Zalt and his wife, Mary. And they're...SENĆOŦEN names are up on the on the caption over there. I'm not sure how to pronounce them. So shared these with both the George family and the Claxtons, and so we know who they are. This is the...little Salish dogs that are now extinct that the women would spin their, spin their wool with.
Briony Penn 49:10
So, you know, I grew up with an interesting like, you know, I tried, what, how, what was our relationship? Like my great aunts, Nancy's mom, used to speak Chinook [Trading language developed in 1800s]. So their relationship to their neighbors was neighborly. They would buy fish from Charlie. It was, there was, you know, a communication through Chinook. It was a very different relationship than I had, you know, 75 or two generations later, by that time, there was no one left living on the reserve, the relationships had started to sever. So it's, it's really interesting. I showed this picture to Maiya Modeste, who's living on Salt Spring now. She's one of the young interns for the Stqeeye' Learning Society. This is her great great grandfather, and he's taking my great granny down the Cowichan River. So there was relationships. So this was kind of like a tourist thing you could do. You could phone up, you could phone up the Cowichan, and you could phone up Mr. Thorne, and he would meet you at Scutz falls, and you get into the canoe, and he'd take you down the Cowichan River. And it was what you could do. It was sort of like an afternoon trip and and this was, you know, a beautiful canoe. And it was what people did. They go over to Cowichan, they go up on the river and come down with Mr. Thorne. That was the story that I heard from Nancy.
Briony Penn 51:06
So I pulled this quote from Ruskin because I thought, well, this is interesting. One of the great things about Ruskin, I think I said, is that he always said, "I everything I say, I contradict myself." and this is one of his great contradictions, and I think it's, in a way, it's kind of given me this way of thinking about how they thought, you know, to all intensive purposes. They were rich, but they were, were also trying to live a life that was not as...I'll just read it. For those who can't read it, "the persons who become rich are, generally speaking, industrious, resolute, proud, covetous, prompt, methodical, sensible, unimaginative, insensitive and ignorant, the persons who remain poor are the entirely foolish, the entirely wise, the idle, the reckless, the humble, the thoughtful, the dull, the imaginative, the sensitive, the well informed, the improvident, the irregularly and impulsively wicked, the clumsy knave, the open Thief And the Entirely Merciful, just and godly person."
Briony Penn 52:22
I kind of think it says it all. And when we speak to about our divides, even on the island, I feel like we could kind of do with a bit of Ruskin right now, because I think we there's these are issues that we're still all struggling with, about privilege, and who we are in the universe. And this is the quote that I love, "For myself, I'm never satisfied that I've handled the subject properly until I've contradicted myself at least three times: But one must do for this evening."
Briony Penn 52:55
So now I want to jump. So that's Maud. I think it's, she's complex. She, this is her last. This is 1918, this is one of the last paintings. I mean pictures, I think of her and her husband, Arthur. Arthur, World War One, like for every family, had an extraordinary impact. And so her son, Monty, went off to war. Her husband died in 1918. He went overseas, and he died in 1918 and so from that moment on, he was quite young he was only 50, and from that time on, she was on her own. And so this is, this is one of her mountain pictures. And Nancy used to say to us, yep. And what it was it?
Talk Attendee 53:55
Granny liked to hike up her skirts and climb mountains?
Briony Penn 53:58
Yes, granny like to hike up her skirts and climb mountain, granny hitched up, hitched up her skirts. Yes. So this is Glacier National Park, and here's she's kind of got her, her camping gear on here, and she's sketched a little skier up here. They were really adventurous people. When you think of the times, you think, wow, I don't even go up to Glacier National Park, you know, without a lot of effort.
Briony Penn 54:27
So, so 1918, and Monty has been at war, and he's come home. And this is Monty as a young man. That's Russell island in the background, I row probably well, sometimes I row twice a week. Sometimes it's not quite as regular, but for me, rowing, especially during covid, was the way I could stay sane and I would immediately feel happy again. I. In the water. It doesn't matter what time of day, and I'm rowing, and this, when I saw this picture, it just, it was so, so evocative. I just kind of went, Wow, we don't realize these patterns of how people healed their...you know, their traumas.
Briony Penn 55:24
And Monty was also wrote this poem. And this poem has always been a big part. It was always, you know, my mom would read it to us and, and you can read it. It's written on the last panel there. I'll just read you. It says, "I love this western island with its - well, this one says from or on the other one, it says purple legend height - and to hear the tide go whispering by on a breathless summer's night." It's very much, you know, it's not a poet's poem, it's just somebody who loves this place's poem. And I always it goes through the seasons. "But most of all, I love that island in the spring, when the life begins to murmur and love is on the wing, when the grouse begins his drumming to call his unknown hen to then I want to be there, tis home, and it is spring."
Briony Penn 56:29
So you know what he went through was, I can't imagine. You can see what he went through because he had gone to art school. He'd gone back to England to go to art school. Well at first he went to enlist, and then after enlisting, he went to art school and trained and got a job for a few years at Wedgewoods, which is the old pottery place. And he he made these sculptures for Wedgwoods. Do you remember in the old days, you go into people's cabinets and they have those little china figures? Well you can see some of them in that cabinet that he designed. So he was part of that generation of young artists that were making these, these sculptures. And this is one of Nicolas. It's worth going and seeing. It's kind of a rough, half finished picture of a soldier that is obviously he's got a grenade in his hand and he's dying. So the horrors of that, and I feel like all the playfulness just stopped in the albums, and that sort of exuberance that pre, sort of early 20th century exuberance just disappeared and died. But some of the things that I remember, he also died young. He had not only did he fight in First World War, he fought in the Second World War, and he also went through a depression.
Briony Penn 57:57
But the little that we have of him, he loved making maps. And he would make these little, like, secret little maps, you know, where to go, and where Lyoness is and all these things and, you know. And I realized how influenced I was by, by all these kinds of maps. So he married my granny, who was also another member of, you know, settler families. And this is my mom. This is her granny. This is Maud, and this is Rosemary. And I think both Nicola and I would say that she the influence down through the generations is incredibly strong, like just the painting, the outside, the love of nature, the nurturing.
Briony Penn 58:49
And this is a Ruskin quote, "if the earth belongs as much to those who are to come after us as to us, we have no right by anything that we do or neglect to involve them in unnecessary penalties or deprive them of benefits which it was in our power to bequeath." If you think about it, that's that is very much an indigenous worldview, that we have no right to rob future generations of the pleasures that we've enjoyed. And I, again. I feel like my little great granny, that picture, the last one over there, in her way, lived that life. My mom also trained as a teacher. She trained as a teacher. She was a teacher all her life. And this is me same beach, and this is a Ruskin quote: "Education is a painful, continual and difficult work to be done in kindness, by watching, by mourning, by praying. But above all, by example."
Briony Penn 1:00:02
And my mom went to art school as well. Like her, her dad, there's a few of her paintings, but she became a mother of five children and a teacher full time. And she really did never paint again, but she certainly spent she would, we would go out on the beach, and she would teach me to do watercolors, and she would tell me how her granny would mix up alizarin crimson to put into the trees just to give them a bit of a sparkle. Or, you know, she would...the names of the pigments and the, techniques were all just part of my childhood. Oh yeah, this is the....this is her painting. I must have repeated this, so just ignore that one. But this is her painting. You can see it right here, her self portrait. So funny how some didn't...Anyway, some are missing, but that's okay.
Briony Penn 1:01:02
So this is one of the maps I did, and it's only when I go back and I, you know, delved into this Arts and Crafts movement, how influenced I was with the Arts and Crafts movement, because this is just sort of straight, you know, trying to mimic, you know, Mr. Gorley. And it was a, you know, it was a project where I was interviewing, you know, getting the stories from First Nations, the Elliots, and the elders and the older people in the community, and trying to collect up the natural history. I did this when 1994 or something, but you know, you can see it's straight out of the, straight out of pattern. So this is a really interesting thing that happened to me.
Briony Penn 1:01:55
So for years I was I recorded stories of an elder called Cecil Paul Wa'xaid, and he has this beautiful philosophy of the fact that we're all in this magic canoe right now. We're paddling up some very difficult...we're navigating some very difficult waters. And the magic canoe is magic because it can...be as big as the people. Can take as many people who want to get into it, and it's very much a Hanaksiala teaching. And for years, I was working with Cecil , and I just had recorded his stories over the years, and then I helped put them together in a collection and and he wanted it called Stories From the Magic Canoe. And the day that I submitted the last, we did two books together, Stories From the Magic Canoe and Following the Good River, the day I was about to send the final manuscript for its final-final it's going to print of the Following the Good River, I found, I was going through my mum's stuff, and it was for this, you know, the archives. And like trying to sort out, what am I keeping, what am I not? There's a whole bunch of papers all folded over, and they're in the - you can see them in the cabinet.
Briony Penn 1:03:24
I was going to just throw them out because I thought they were just more of her art school stuff, but I thought, no, I'll just open them up. I opened it up and there was a canoe with two children in it, and then on the other side was this text, and it's said: "the magic canoe that the old couple -So the old couple, Charlie and Mary- who used to live here, went out in one day, and the God of winds took them away." Because we don't know what happened to Charlie and Mary. People believe that they were murdered and they were robbed. And it's, it's very much was kind of part of a, kind of like a shocking story for people who knew them. "He left me floating on the sea for days -this is the canoe speaking- I wandered all amongst the Gulf Islands, and finally, one day, a great eagle alighted on me in return for my giving him a perch. When he saw my lonely plight. He said, I am Chief of the birds. You are now enchanted and can return to your home. I give you speech and power to go wherever you wish, provided you carry children as your passengers. To everyone else, you're invisible, but to children, you are visible. I've been here for years, but always, children have come with grown ups, and I've had to stay invisible. I've been waiting to show children the lovely land they live in, only they're far too busy rushing around with their parents. Do you mean? Says Jill excitedly -that was her little sister, Nicolas mum- you can take us in your magic canoe?" So that was my mom writing this story when she was 16 years old. I literally opened up the day of sending off the manuscript, and I thought, well, you know the synchronicity that my mom was very much a person that believed in synchronicity. She said that it was the Welsh side, not the Tyrwhitt Drake side, and...
Briony Penn 1:05:19
for me, it was just kind of like...she didn't finish that project. And so in my final acknowledgments, I said, I guess she was waiting for Cecil to help me finish it, because there was no one to ask. And I think it was like this moment in time. I think that wartime, residential schools were starting to really gear up there. There was a period, you know, first two generations, where there was relationship, and then the land started...the forces of colonization really started creating this separation. And I felt like that, in the in the in this big sort of slightly mystical world that even people like Ruskin summoned up, that there was these elements. There was these... sort of supremely human moments of feeling connected to one another.
Briony Penn 1:06:32
So anyway, I'm just going to finish off now with Charlie. So Charlie is my niece, and Charlie so my brother's daughter, Charlie was born, and little girl on Salt Spring, but then her dad had to, they left to go to New Zealand for variety of reasons. And when I said to Charlie, she's back here now, she's on Salt Spring, many of you picked her up hitchhiking. Big, tall girl looks a bit like me. These are ones that when, when she was young, she would do little sketches. So I put them in my bathroom and kept them. So I said, Charlie, I'm going to put all your little sketches in the show, because they mean so much to me and I was going through the Ruskin things, and one of them said, "one can't be angry when one looks at a penguin" This is a penguin from New Zealand that she saw. She's very much she's an incredible natural history like eye. She sort of grew up just sort of running wild in New Zealand. And she loves birds. She's just got a great gift with birds. And so this is another Ruskin: "nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty, if only we have the eyes to see them." And I always loved her feathers. And here are some Ruskin feathers.
Briony Penn 1:08:02
Okay, so here's the thing that happened today. I asked my brother, I said, could you send me one of Charlie's sketches? He's in New Zealand, so he sent me this. So I thought, Oh, great. This is, you know, beautiful. This is sort of tangled. Well, I was going through one of the scrapbooks, it's in the archives, and it's one of the Tyrwhitt Drake's scrapbooks. And...this painting here is 1850 I think it's done by the mother of Montague Tyrwhitt Drake. I don't know. I'm gonna check. Didn't have time to check. Ben looked at it, and I went, wow, there's the same kind of cleft in this. In this, can see the cleft. It's a damaged tree, but what is it? It's habitat, right? And Charlie's never seen this. Charlie's. Charlie didn't even really spend a lot of time until she came back to...and being a typical, you know, 20 something, she's really busy. She's training as an electrician. She doesn't have time to sit and, you know, hear about the family. She wasn't even able to come today.
Briony Penn 1:09:15
She's going to come and see the show. But I this is for her. This is her...this is seven generations. And I just think that we don't celebrate enough the fact that we've kind of created these stereotypes of ourselves as settlers and colonizers, and we need to, we need and also we make these things about, you know, everybody that came to Salt Spring, you know, there was a sort of monotypical, kind of stereotype for it. But I think that, I think that in this crazy paradoxical -there's so much paradox, beauty and...well, I just say beauty and paradox- that it just for me, it suggests that that is what Salt Spring is. We've always had these beautiful kind of contradictions, you know, the difference of opinion surrounded by water and there's, there's a pattern to it, and it's always, probably been there as long as the settler population. And in fact, you know, it's the human condition. You know, if, if, judging from, you know, some of the family arguments that the Underwoods and the Claxtons can have there, they have the same, same issues.
Briony Penn 1:10:48
So anyway, I've got two last slides. This, to me, sums up...we're not quite sure which great granny. This is, can't quite be Lillian, but we haven't quite figured out who she is, have we Nicola? No, but there's definitely 1,2,3, generations. Love this one with her hat looks like she's wearing a wedding cake or something. And this is it. Pooks Hill, Lyoness, Kingfisher Cove, Beaver Point. This is like the quintessential place for us. And my grandfather had said to Lotus, you know, Maud never wants -or no. Maud had said to Lotus Ruckle, I never want this land subdivided or destroyed. And unfortunately, it did, just for, because families have differences in values, and we've all gone through this and but a lot of it has been protected under covenant, and so the you know, elements of this still exist.
Briony Penn 1:12:00
And I feel like this has been a time to commemorate those that have tried to hold on to the importance all those, those little principles that Ruskin said at the beginning. And in conclusion, I just want to say this is a team effort. This is my family pulling in some nets, and together. And again, I just want to pay tribute to Chris and Ceri and everyone there. Sophia, Karen Hudson, Nicola, yeah, Charlie and my partner Jeff, and dedicate it to the strong women and gentlemen of [unintelligable].
Talk Attendee 1:13:25
[Crowd applause]
Ceridwen 1:13:26
Do want to take a few questions?
Briony Penn 1:13:27
Yeah, I can take questions if anyone has them.
Christina Marshall 1:13:29
We're a little later on little later on time but we've got a few questions if we want to ask Briony anything.
Talk Attendee 1:13:34
[indistinguishable talk about turning lights off]
Talk Attendee 1:13:36
These large pictures, where were they done?
Briony Penn 1:13:40
Nicola got them done at Island Blueprint?
Briony Penn 1:13:42
Yeah, they kind of shine through. We thought that was a great I think Bill Vernon had experimented with it. They're not that expensive. They just, it's just on regular paper, and you just, all these new fangled methods, yeah?
Talk Attendee 1:13:58
For Indian Smith, I found myself saying church, no, I mean program windows, because they look they remind me of staying lost..of course the subject matter is very different. There is that lovely effect with the shape.
Talk Attendee 1:14:13
Thanks for all the Ruskin quotes. It seems to reflect some of William Blake as well. I wonder if he had a strong influence.
Briony Penn 1:14:23
Well, what I did is I just picked the people that I knew, that they had read, because I don't, but certainly, you know, there's a whole cluster of influences within that period. Like it was an incredible period when you are looking, I mean, those of you who know William Blake, everything from the poetry to the art and the architecture. I mean, it was this, this period was, you know, both extraordinary and then also devastating. So it's. Um, again, kind of like everything, really interesting period, yeah.
Talk Attendee 1:15:08
Whose names you listed in the color palette, there's Montague. And another Montague? Did they all live on Salt Spring?
Briony Penn 1:15:17
Montague didn't. He was in Victoria, although he probably, you know, sailed by for sure, and then everybody else did, yeah. But just either some permanent, some like Maud lived here from March to end of September, end of October, or something like that.
Talk Attendee 1:15:39
In what area?
Briony Penn 1:15:41
Down at what she called Lyoness Beaver Point. In the cottage, that cottage that no longer exists. It was a shame it was there until a few years ago, yeah, yeah, they were neighbors with the Ruckles, Lotus Ruckle she was...Yeah.
Talk Attendee 1:15:56
Are they, any of the paintings, are they available to look at in archives here?
Briony Penn 1:16:00
Yeah, yeah. And there's, there's hundreds of them, but I think you they're also digital, and one of the things we'd like to do at some stage is to get them into the commons, so people want to use them. They can and enjoy them.
Christina Marshall 1:16:26
They will all go online, Eventually. It's a process, but, you know, you can see some of the ones, particular to Salt Spring here and Victoria, but they will be online eventually.
Talk Attendee 1:16:34
Have you updated the hours of the archives? Because I've been up there and it was closed.
Christina Marshall 1:16:38
Yeah, it's not...just phone or email us and we can make an appointment to come up. You know that, you know the issue with staffing.
Briony Penn 1:16:46
Yeah
Talk Attendee 1:16:46
Hi. Do you have all the negatives for those photos? Or did you scan them?
Briony Penn 1:16:49
We scanned them. I don't, I don't know if we have negatives, yeah, which is a shame, but might have some.
Talk Attendee 1:17:12
You mean the archives have the negatives, or?
Briony Penn 1:17:15
No, I don't think the archives do I make. I have some negatives at home, so I can look at them.
Briony Penn 1:17:21
But how did they get to the archives?
Briony Penn 1:17:23
Just in albums. Yeah. So are there any more questions? Yeah, just one or two?
Talk Attendee 1:17:33
So I'm wondering if we lifted this up a little bit, there's a picture of a very, a group of women on the, sitting on the grass, and the one and the third one from the left with quite a look on her face, do you have any idea who she might be?
Briony Penn 1:17:56
This one here?
Talk Attendee 1:17:56
No, that one.
Briony Penn 1:17:58
Oh, um, I think that, like we looked at this one, it's, I think that one's a friend. I don't think that's like, there's a daughter, there's...that's a friend. And we do have the names of some of the friends,
Talk Attendee 1:18:15
All right, yeah, no, I just was curious. She's got such a curious expression on her face.
Briony Penn 1:18:21
Yea, unfortunately, they weren't very good at labeling, so we've just been trying to pick. You can start seeing the likenesses, but yeah.
Talk Attendee 1:18:30
Thank you.
Talk Attendee 1:18:33
[unintelligable] who had done research also through the book. But we only...he wasn't sure either.
Briony Penn 1:18:39
Yeah, we've lost, we've lost Nancy for some of them. Anyway, people probably want to...
Christina Marshall 1:18:47
Yeah, so if there's more questions, just to remind you that Brian will be doing another talk on the 26th along with Nicola, who is a poet, and we'll have a poetry reading. And of course, given the subject matter and the era that we're talking about, we'll be having a tea so we hope we'll all be able to come back to that and hopefully a preview of our calendar as well. So thank.
451_Briony Penn_Painted with Tea_Historical Talk-2_Nov_26_ 2022.mp3
otter.ai
03.2026
yes
Inara Wallace
Summary Keywords
Salt Spring Historical Society, family tree, plein air painting, John Ruskin, Arts and Crafts movement, Montague Tyrwhitt-Drake, Maud Lillian Tyrwhitt-Drake, colonial art, family photographs, land acknowledgement, Indigenous relationships, creative vision, historical exhibit, family legacy, local history.
Speakers
Bob, Nicola, Talk Attendee, Christina Marshall, Ceridwen, Speaker 2, Briony Penn, Speaker 1
Talk Attendees 00:00
[indistinguishable talking]
Ceridwen 00:02
November, 26
Bob 00:06
little markers here with the colors that tell you who did what and what they represent. So at the end, when you have a chance to go around, you'll see the various generations wrapping up at the very back, with the youngest one doing the birds and so on of of the area. So welcome Briony to our program, and I'll let you turn it over to you and let you carry on. Thank you.
Briony Penn 00:29
Thanks so much Bob. Can everyone hear me okay? Yeah. So thanks so much, Bob and and double, triple, quadruple thanks to the Salt Spring Historical Society and Archives, in particular Chris and Ceri, we have had a ton of fun putting this together, and I can thank you both also for what also started as a it's been a long, sort of, as they say, a long journey, because a lot of this collection came from Nancy Braithwaite. Some of you may remember, she's our cousin. She comes down through, Maud was her granny, which you'll be hearing about in a little while. She was my mom's first cousin, and so she donated many of these photographs and albums, and it all sort of started there.
Briony Penn 01:24
And then Chris said, well, let's have a show. And then it kind of spread, because there were so many artists in the, in the family that she said, Well, let's extend it out. And so that's why it's a sixth generation show. So before I start, I want to, I want to start with a very different, I hope, land acknowledgement, because it's a very personal one. Because growing up, as you can imagine, down in the south end, right next to the Fulford the Tsawout reserve. We were always really aware of the stories around who, who had lived there, because some of the pictures you'll see were, you know, neighbors, Charlie Joseph and his wife, who is a Malahat from the Malahat nation.
Briony Penn 02:21
And so when, you know, whenever I would think about an acknowledgement, I would think, well, this is the place that people were living and no longer live. And so it...I phoned up Belinda Claxton and SELILIYE and I said, SELILIYE, I'm having this show. And she and Gwen were on the call, and neither of them were able to make it today because there's just too many bugs around and but they said their blessing, and to me, that's the most important part of my land acknowledgement, which is that I've, I think that members of my family at different times have managed to maintain a relationship that is moving into the sixth generation, and I got my two boys here, who I think are in their way also, you know, maintaining relationships, and that, to me, is kind of the most important thing about what we're trying to do in this really messy time.
Briony Penn 03:29
So that's sort of one of the themes of this show. And the other person that's been really pivotal with this are two people, and it's going to be part of the the proceedings of the day is my cousin Nicola, or Adelia McWilliam. And Nicola has been a really powerful creative force in this with both her poetic eye and her painterly eye. And I just want to acknowledge you for your vision, for it becoming much, much more than I thought we were going to do, and but I really thank you for doing it, because it's really, I think, in a way, it's done our ancestors proud.
Briony Penn 04:11
I'm hoping that you know, it's an acknowledgement to their work and their values and their philosophy, and I hope you'll enjoy the playfulness of it. And then Guy Tyrwhitt Drake, another cousin, Guy's been a historian and worked on a book about our mutual well, your great grandfather, our great great grandfather, who starts, kicks off the show Montague, Tyrwhitt Drake, and he's brought in their family collection. And it's really made it, give it that sort of very sort of the enduring quality that stand from colonial times all the way up to...the present.
Briony Penn 05:00
And then finally, Charlie, my niece, who has agreed to allow some of her sketches to be reproduced and mounted. And just to give you a little taste of what she's been up to, some of her pieces you can see under, on walls around Victoria, sort of graffiti that is trying to say something different. And it's kind of like the contemporary expression of, I think, a long tradition.
Briony Penn 05:35
So...one of the things that happened was that Chris said, "well, I'd love to see a family tree." And I said, oh my god, are you kidding? I said it would take up the whole exhibit. And so I was trying to think of a way to just, you know, simply guide people about who's related to who. And so I had Nancy had collected a lot of these little paint boxes that were all the, they were all skechers outdoor sketchers. So these are little outdoor paint sets that have been produced by Windsor and Newton for over 150 years. And I knew some of them because they would have their names scratched on them.
Briony Penn 06:20
So I went to the oldest, with the oldest dried up paints, and then and then forwarded, and then ended up with my own. And then Charlie. I made you, I made you a palette, because Charlie's is a different kind of medium these days, but so...that was, to me, was to do two things. One was, there is actually a change, and you can actually see the change in the, in the pigment, but also to look at the continuity.
Briony Penn 06:50
And part of the continuity stems from the fact that, you know, some pigments are just amazing, and some pigments really lend themselves to this landscape. But it's also to me, this is kind of like the way that I saw the progression of skills moving through generations, because we all learned how to paint from our parents. So Montague William Tyrwhitt Drake, born in 1830, he is, you know, you can see those very, very earthy colors. He was the father of Maud Lillian Tyrwhitt Drake. Maud was the mother of Montague. Montague was the father of Rosemary. Rosemary was my mother. And Charlie's my niece. So that's who's featured here in the six generations. And all of us have been or lived on Salt Spring.
Briony Penn 07:45
And so that was the other you know, either spent summers or lived or visited. Montague was pretty early, he arrived in...well, we'll start with Montague. And here's, here's the paint boxes. You can see these tiny little ones, and it was such an amazing moment to mix these pigments and bring them, rehydrate them from over 100 years, and bring the pigments up and to see that they're just as beautiful as the day that they were mixed.
Briony Penn 08:16
And I felt such a kinship. I was just it was like really extraordinary experience. The other, where I got the other tips too is from their books. So all of them were readers of and also family members were members of the Arts and Crafts movement. And I think in the first talk I gave to the Historical Society, I just focused in on the historical aspects of the Arts and Crafts movement, which I'm not going to do today, but I am going to talk a little bit about John Ruskin, because he was such an influence on all members of my family, even my mom. I remember my mom bringing out the books The Art of Painting, The Art of Observing, The Role of Natural World, and teaching you to observe.
Briony Penn 09:00
And so I thought as a way to introduce my family, I would start with this photograph, and that's the other thing. This wasn't just a show about paintings, it's also a show about photographs. They were photographers, and there have been photographers in my family, also for six generations, and both my sons are photographers, and so I really wanted to celebrate the eye of the photographer as a kind of companion piece.
Briony Penn 09:32
And these photographs go right back to 1858, when...Montague first arrives, but I want to introduce you to my family, because this is so symptomatic of who I identify and who I think we are. The family on the beach is not my family. They're they're a family that's come from England. My mother tells this story. She said, "Oh yes, that was Lord so and so. And they came down to the beach. They were a bit disgusted to see that you're all...they were all out on a raft and having lots of fun, and they were all in their clothes." So this is, there's three generations on this raft, and I think it's...it's, you can't quite see it.
Briony Penn 10:20
But this, to me, is who my family are, and we'll, we'll keep going. I think, so John Ruskin really was somebody who is reacting to the industrialization of Europe. Yeah, that's better. Thanks, Nora. Maybe, even another one, just to yeah, and actually, I'll just go back one more time so we can just look at it. Then you can actually read. So this is a Ruskin quote: "The common practice of keeping up appearance with society is a mere selfish struggle of the vain with the vain." I think they were very influenced by some of these. You know, the sort of anti and sort of shifting away from the constrained society of Britain. And here's another one that I love: "The best things in life aren't things." And this is, this is Maud.
Briony Penn 11:12
This is, this is what gave rise to the name [of the show] Painted With Tea. Oh yeah, that's much better. Yeah. Okay, there we go, yeah. You can see them all in their rolled up trousers and rolled up skirts, and they're just out in a raft. I have pictures of every generation of our family on these rafts. So we just make rafts. That's what we do. In fact, I was out in a raft once when my son came and had to rescue me because the raft had taken off, and he was out paddling somewhere else, and then he saw this raft drifting, and it was his, randomly, it was his mother.
Briony Penn 11:49
So anyway, so the reason we called it Painted With Tea is that on the back of one of Maud's, my great grandmother's paintings, it said painted with tea, which means not that she painted it at teatime, but that she had forgotten her water, so she just used her tea. So everything in the picture was a little tea stained, but it's still...you could hardly tell. So this is the first.
Briony Penn 12:18
This is Montague, and he came from the Tyrwhitt Drake family. And if you want to read about the Tyrwhitt Drake family, you can read Guy's book. This was, you know, one of these classic British aristocracy type families that had the younger son was doomed to a life of, you know, if he wasn't going to inherit the estate, he was going to have to either become a military man or a cleric or or he could go off to the colonies. You know, this was a colonizing family. We can go back. What is it? How many generations? Guy? It's like 56 generations. We can count back. Yeah. So when people say, you know, do you know who your ancestors are? I kind of like, I'm sort of embarrassed, but I say, Yes, I do. I do.
Briony Penn 13:11
But this is another aspect of what this exhibit was about, because having spent many time, many, many hours and many you know, gatherings where elders were saying, who are your ancestors? Like tell me who your ancestors are. And I realized that this is a great teaching to actually go back and respect the elements of your ancestors, to go and do a deep dive and to understand, who are you, who are your people?
Briony Penn 13:41
What are your, you know, what are the values and the and the elements of your family? And you know, come with some knowledge of your ancestors. So this, in part, was, for me, was like, yeah, I need to go back and see who are my ancestors. Do I...brand them with a kind of two dimensional veneer? Or do I really try and understand who were they? What were their what was the system like at the time? What were they experiencing?
Briony Penn 14:11
And one of the things that I realized reading these journals. So Montague kept a journal, he was probably escaping quite a constrained society and back in Britain, and I think he just felt he was, had, you know, suddenly acquired a huge sense of freedom. And so we've got scraps of his journals and scraps of his paintings, and he joined the rush of young men to go and discover gold. But I think, differently from him, is he had an eye for observing and recording things. It wasn't unusual for for that, you know, gentleman of the time.
Briony Penn 14:51
So we've got these little glimpses of who he is and what he was doing, and these really interesting records of burial sites, Burial Cairns, there's, there's, his sketches are in the British Museum. Some of the only images that we have at contact of some of the burial Cairns, even in Lekwungen territory, are by him. So he then went on to become, you know, a mayor of Victoria, remember, the legislature, Supreme Court Judge and, but he always kept up his sketching. So he was, you know, in terms of ground zero, he was ground zero for...as a colonizer. But who was he?
Briony Penn 15:35
So this is one of the, this is one of the burial areas or caches that he experiences in Fort Hope just realized I was looking at the wrong image. So you're probably wondering why I was. These are sketches when he's arriving in Victoria. This is a photograph. This is HMS cormorant, which is one of the first British warships to come and patrol the newly emerging U.S. - British border. And this is out, they're always out in canoes, row boats. I don't think we found a single picture where they weren't in some...on the sea having a picnic. There's a lot of pictures of Victoria and, and then his paintings, and you can see where James Bay is now, was once, you know, an incredible estuary. These are his travels up the interior. There was lots of these kind of camping and stories.
Briony Penn 16:37
And I think he's talking about Mr. Colquhoun, is it same Colquhoun as Colquhoun grant? Maybe not. But anyway, there's there's stories and the paintings. And I think what part of also, what was really interesting to me was that they, they were also coming out, not only of a kind of a Ruskin esque sensibility and Arts and Crafts movement, but also, you know, the Romantics and all the influences that are going on. This is, I think this is Hope. And I also think there's sort of an unusual photograph, because she's, there's a woman here, and then there's a man just with his hat there. So I'm not quite sure what they're up to.
Briony Penn 17:21
So at the same time the photographs, they started off with pinhole cameras, and then they, you know, moved into the very first brownies in by the, you know, the turn of the century. And this is just another Ruskin quote, because the other thing that Nicola and I found is that there's so many playful photographs, it feels like they were so overjoyed to have arrived in a place of such beauty and such lack of the same kind of restrictions. And this is Montague's daughter, Maud. And this is her first, we think her first, this is her first poem and painting. It's when she's falling off her horse, on the on the, on the right, you know, your left. And she has this little story about so they were, you know, wildly adventurous.
Briony Penn 18:14
They were, they were just roaming around this incredible place, discovering things. Painting was always plein air. They had, all, you know, using Ruskin's recommendations for which pigments. And here's another one of Maud's early paintings as a young woman, they would go on. And I thought, found this one so poignant. These are Hudson's Bay blankets lying out, and they're out on a camping trip. And we have photographs, we know what the camping trips look like. They would, you know, bring out all their China and have, you know, I mean, it, it was, and this one, I think we're not sure if she's drinking tea or or whiskey.
Briony Penn 19:01
But what they were doing in a lot of these things was they had these sketch clubs, these kind of plein air sketch clubs. And so Maud was one of the artists selected for the show called rebels and - radicals and...oh gosh, what's it called? Realists and Radicals, something like that. And it was a show they'd done at the Victoria Art Gallery about the Victoria sketch club that was, included Emily Carr. And they were out in the, they would go out and do these sketches. So this was the milieu in which into which Emily Carr was introduced. Was all these kind of very playful, you know, sort of early colonist women having fun out in the, you know, outside and sketching.
Briony Penn 19:52
And so some of them that included people like Sophie Pemberton, and this is just in a in one of the albums. Where it's one of them has just sketched this into her, to an album that belonged to the, I think this is one of the Creases albums. But Maud was, this is her cousin. And so these, you know, these were the sort of early women artists of the colonial period at the time, and they were all kind of influencing one another.
Briony Penn 20:27
So…these were Maud's paintings…? She painted over 600 paintings. We've, I think we've counted till now. She painted because she, that's all she did. I mean, we've gone through her diaries, and she says, yeah, she went out for tea, and then she went sketching, and then she went sketching, and then she went out for tea. So these were women of leisure. They had, she had a Chinese, you know, what did they call I don't know. They probably say servant, another man servant.
Briony Penn 21:00
And she was widowed early, and she just lived. She by 1908, she'd moved most of the year to Salt Spring and lived in this little cottage, which we will show you in a minute. And then she sketched and she you know, that was her life. That was her sanctuary. She was widowed early. I come to think that this, this whole sort of plein air, was also part of her therapy.
Briony Penn 21:31
I mean, she was, they were, there was a lot of changing. With the advent of the war, World War One, their lives were completely turned upside down. She traveled everywhere. She would go up in the Maquinna. She would go up and paint all the way up the West Coast. She would go down to the Sierra Madres and climb into the mountains. She would she would go by train up to Glacier and troop through the mountains and...so here they are taking their photographs with their brown cameras.
Briony Penn 22:06
This is, this is Xwaaqw'um [or XOEKKEM], Burgoyne Bay. This is looking out from Malahat, looking out over Salt Spring. She just painted everywhere. So as a collection, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to help, you know...catalog this, is that we've got a record of the landscape in between, you know, the 1880s and the 1930s. What did it look like there?
Briony Penn 22:35
Well, I didn't even know there was a dock down it Adam, at Burgoyne Bay. So this is the interior of the cottage on Salt Spring. It was just a tiny little cottage. And she was a carver as well. She carved that EAST, WEST Hames best. And we all grew up with her paintings over the fireplace. And that was just and my...mom, you know, everybody in the family had her paintings. She would give her paintings to everybody in the family, and so that's kind of how we grew up with them. These are other photographs the place that that my grandfather, our great, great grandfather, great grandfather [Arthur Weaver-Bridgman?]. It was this section that is now known, it just sort of lies between Fulford and Beaver Point. So their neighbors were the Ruckles. Lotus Ruckle was a friend of my great grandmother's. They were companions.
Briony Penn 23:36
And this bay here is is an old village site, and it's just adjacent and right next door to the Fulford reserve. And so there, and this is what it's called Kingfisher Cove. And it's, so just to locate everybody in the south of Salt Spring, kind of Beaver Point area. And these are kind of the photographs that are on that side, is she would, usually they would just row over to Cowichan and they would, it was one of the kind of things you would do is you would call up the Thorne family and say, Can we go down the Cowichan? And this is Abner Thorne's grandfather. He was born in 1865, and and I worked with Abner, you know, five...four generations later. And then we discovered, oh, yeah, our, you know, respective ancestors had...enjoyed these trips down together.
Briony Penn 24:39
So this was a business that the Thorne family would bring a canoe down and take day trippers down, the Cowichan river, when you could actually do that, when there was enough flow in the river, and then they would take...drive the canoe up, and then they'd take another thing down. So that was a really sweet moment, because the Thornes now, when...you, at the Stqeeye' learning society at Xwaaqw'um. Brianna Thorne, this is her family. So there's these beautiful ties back and back to the Thorne family from Cowichan, and then the Joseph family. I don't think Brian's in the room, but when we worked with Tiffany Joseph, this is some of her family members from Tsawout. So this was one of the paintings up in in Glacier. And she would just get on a train or get on the boat and head up and go and paint the wilds. You know, the illicit was that, and you can see they're in their climbing gear.
Briony Penn 25:39
This is my great granny and my great grandfather on a climb somewhere. As I said, he died very soon after this photograph was taken. Died right at the...end of the First World War. So she was mostly a widow for much of her life. This is, this is kind of a classic one that I love we don't actually know which Granny, great, great granny that is, but we think it is one of the great, great grannies. And there's Maud and my grandfather Monty, and they're having tea, of course. And this is, this is the cottage.
Briony Penn 26:15
It's a very modest, little arts and crafts cottage that is, you know, she, did a lot of the, she made a lot of the furniture. I have a lot of her furniture, all beautifully carved and and it was pretty modest, and they would still have tea. But they they lived...you know, she lived quite a free life for a woman in that time, as a widow and as a painter. So this is my grandfather, Montague. Monty. Another Monty. It's very confusing. And he wrote this beautiful poem that we all grew up with. And I won't read it today, because we're going to get lots more, but you can go and read it. Yeah, it's over there. I...and I'll just read the very first thing it says, you know, "I love this western island."
Briony Penn 27:01
He absolutely loved this island, and at the age of 18, he was sent off to the war. And he was an artist. He after the war, he went to art school and he studied, and he was amazing with figurines and boats, and he was also a watercolor artist. We've got lots of his little sketches of watercolors. He, you know, he came back to Canada and was a China designer. He worked for Wedgwood. He designed some of the, if you see in the cabinet, all the cabinet has got some of the sculptures and the books, and it's sort of a little curated Museum of some of the influences and then these are some of his maps and some of his paintings and photographs. And then he had to go to the Second World War. And again, I think that you know this correlation of being outside, being calmed, the sanctuary of the natural world.
Briony Penn 28:06
All these things I know have been influences. You know, both on Nicole and I, it was just assumed, if you were upset, you just...went outside. This is my great granny, Maud, and my mother, Rosemary. And this, this is everything I remember of my mom. My mom loved her grandmother. She learned to paint from her. She would sit on the beach and they would paint, and then this is me, exactly the same thing. I would sit on the beach with my mom. I'm looking kind of defiant, so nothing's changed. Yeah.
Briony Penn 28:39
My mom's like, she also went to art school, but then she came back, and she raised five children and taught full time, and she never really realized her art career, but she was super supportive of me. And, you know, you can see these paintings, they're here, and I start seeing all these influences, like the maps. And my grandfather made maps, and then you know that my interest in the stories of the, you know, First Nations and the families that lived there. And of course, this was part of these conversations. My great aunts all spoke Chinook. And I remember, at towards the end of her life, Nancy's mom, she only spoke Chinook, so we could never understand her. She had a bit of dementia, but she did speak Chinook.
Briony Penn 29:33
And then so finally, I wanted to, I'm ending with Charlie. This is one of Charlie's turkey vultures. Charlie, I think, has just got this exceptional eye for birds and the lightness of feathers. And I was going through the quotes, and this is a Ruskin quote, "one can't be angry when one looks at a penguin." And so Charlie sent me her paintings, and one of them was a penguin. And I said, yeah, you can't be angry when you look at a penguin. Charlie hasn't seen this, but this is one of the things I really wanted to share with you all.
Briony Penn 30:06
There's two beautiful coincidences of...that to me are...sort of say everything. I called up her dad, who's in New Zealand, which is why she was drawing penguins. And I said, "Can you send me another, some more of Charlie's sketches?" And he sent me the sketch that she did. You don't know this, Charlie, so this is all new. And then I was going through one of the albums, and I found this drawing, this one here, which is done in 1850 which was done by one of the Tyrwhitt Drake's that precedes Montague. So this may have been his mother, his father, I don't know, but it's in the family sketch album.
Briony Penn 30:43
And I looked at the two of them, and I went, Wow, Charlie's never seen this album, but this is your family, Charlie. And so you come by it honestly. And then the other thing that I just wanted to share, which was a really uncanny situation, which is when Charlie Joseph and his wife were -when my mom was growing up, when she was about 15- they they were discovered. Their canoe is discovered, but they were missing, and there was a lot of speculation that they'd been robbed and murdered.
Briony Penn 31:24
And it really, I know it upset my mom, because she would tell us that story all the time. And what I didn't know is that when she was 16, she had started a story, a little short story, for her, her two sisters, and this was during the war, she'd started a story that was called the magic canoe, and it was all about these two little girls that found this canoe that had that had drifted back up ashore, and this canoe was going to take them on a journey, to teach them all about this place and what had happened, and to teach them....and you can read some of the words that I've written. I don't know if you can read them, but it was about showing children the beauty of this place and that...adults were useless right now because they were too busy rushing around all the time.
Briony Penn 32:13
And then Jill -so this is Nicolas mum- Is one of the characters in the book, says you can, oh, you can read it. You can take it... "you mean, you can take us in your magic canoe?" yes. Now I found this manuscript the day I was sending my last manuscript to the publisher on The Magic Canoe. I had no idea my mom had written this. And, well, actually wasn't The Magic Canoe, it was Following The Good River, because it was in Following The Good River, which is the companion guide to the magic canoe. And so...I said, Could I just stop the press? I said, Could I just put one thing in? And they said, Okay, you can put one thing in the last page on the final, you know. And so I just put an acknowledgement to my mom that she didn't finish that book, but somehow she was waiting for it to be finished, and that, you know, Cecil Paul was, was the person that was gonna help help us finish this.
Briony Penn 33:14
So, yep, that's my quick...and I'm going to be handing over to Nicola, who's going to read you some of her poems and and then after that, we're going to have tea. And these are all on invasive species, teacups the ivy teacups that come from from Wedgewood, which is...No they're mine. They're mine. I spend my life pulling his stuff out, and I have it all over my China. But this is part of the part of the paradox of being from a highly colonial family is that it is a very, in our humanity in every family, we are such a mix of paradoxes, and that's what I hope I've brought today, is this beautiful mix of paradoxes, of flawed and creative elements in any given family.
Briony Penn 33:14
And I just want to pay tribute again to Salt Spring Historical Society, Chris and Ceri, Sophia, for all the technical stuff. Karen Hudson, the wonderful librarian, Nicola, Guy, Charlie, my brother, and most of all, Jeff Shotford for bearing with me on all this, my partner. Thank you.
Nicola 34:29
I can sort of place my papers here. Can everybody hear me? I have to stand like this. Can you still hear me? Good. Ther, sort of gaze at paintings, perhaps, or maybe actually...what you might want to do is pull the computer...yeah, that's way better.
Nicola 35:05
Okay, I had lots so much to say that I've sort of embedded the poems in an essay, and I was afraid I'd forget some things. So here we go. And I, first of all, I just want to say thank you. I want to acknowledge, as Briony did, the help of the Salt Spring Archives, of Chris, Ceri, Sophia, Chris was instrumental. Special shout out to Chris who helped mat and frame many of the paintings. As well, these spectacular, enlarged photographs would not be here if it hadn't been for Chris's tireless leadership in this area, like, what do we do next? What now? And all the specialized work she did to size and prepare them. And then, of course, Ceri, thank you for helpful publicity. And Sophie, I thanked her personally before she went home. So many, many thanks, and to others who I may have forgotten to mention.
Nicola 35:05
"What you really want as you approach Beaver Point, starboard tack, sou' easter filling your sail, blue mountains dancing backwards into the sky. What you really want is to play the time song backwards. On the queen of Cowichan ferries loud speaker announcing details of the passage to Vancouver, five times a day, bending pine needles, bird feathers, dragonfly wings, as it pulses through the throat of a tree frog. As waves from the ferry wake, wash up and shuffle driftwood, you could hitch a ride back in time through the frogs entrails, past British gunboats, Spanish galleons, to when cedar bark clad people in 40 foot dugout canoes navigated by starlight. But you're not yet naked enough to be a time traveler. Can barely see what's here now, gorse obscured cliff, curved eyelid of Shell Beach. You anchor at the cove entrance, row the Salish Sea's frigid water. Walk up to the orchard, sour apples on gnarled branches, old man's beard hanging like reef seaweed, two wooden chairs amidst ragged crab grass. Face the cove. You meet only the caretaker's dog, small with bug eyes, soothed with touch. Approach the old cabin. Long grass around the porch. Your great grandmother's watercolors show cultivated flowers along the path. A postcard to Europe, to ancestors in fine hosiery. You recall that giant print on your grandmother's dining room wall, gray eyed servant girls on a white sand beach, Dover overcast sky, their day off. Over-large hands resting on black velveteen, laudanum of nostalgia. The property is collage of memory from above, ovals of Shell middens, squares of houses, winding trails, flattened, reduced, move so far from signifier, unless we dig, sort, layer, claw, cursing at what's hidden from our vision, unless we cry a little and beg for time to open up like a fan. For this, a photograph or two may help. The orchard where a cousin's wedding party happened, another cousin's marriage on a bluff beyond the beach. Babies born from these unions, peach tang of skin when children are small, the coiled energy of family, the bluff where you camp in deer beds, beneath the choir bench of the dawn chorus, ravens, galats, river otters, apostrophes in the current. Just another day in their neighborhood, and you there quiet in your desire to see. And what if your entire sense of ease in the place where you came dented with exhaustion to have the conversation that took conversations that took days to ferment, like the sweet wine you drank in companionable silliness. You knew the spirits laughed at you when you banged pots and pans and sang. Where you came when you needed to grieve deaths in the family and the ocean literally lifted the pain from your heart and swallowed it, and the tide continued to come in and go out again, implacable as always. What if this turned out to be possible because of a great forgetting? You walk down the road toward the 7000 year old burial mounds near the creek above the older Douglas firs. Up back where the shoreline used to be, midden upon midden, little neck clam, butter clam and cockle shells, amid black, greasy silt and crushed barnacle. You're walking toward the old starlight kept in the shells." So thank you. I think that's probably as much poetry. Poetry's little bit like cheesecake. So I think you can only have so much. But I do have a chat book that's available. I just wanted to cover my posts so they're for sale out there at the door. If you're interested. There are more poems that go deeper into these topics. But I also wanted to invite Briony up and say, did people have anything we wanted, any questions about anything? If not, we'll carry on with tea. But do you want to come up for a second and we'll see.
Nicola 35:59
So it's interesting, as I was looking through my poems, which I wrote mostly for a thesis project, I was accepted to do an MFA at UVic. And for my thesis project, I chose to write about the land, and in the process, discovered a lot of things I had no idea about. You know, that business of the most familiar place, when you look at it actually turns out to be in some ways unfamiliar as you discover more about it.
Nicola 36:27
So it's been a really beautiful odyssey, and I'm very happy, you know, thanks to Nancy Braithwaite for donating the artwork, which sort of triggered the fact that this show happened, and these amazing archival photographs which we've been able to work with, which I think are the...they have this luminous beauty that I've just found stunning. And I honestly feel like I've done a trip into the past of my own family and discovered so much more about them during this time. So as Briony mentioned, this is clearly a family that delighted with being with each other out in nature, especially on the shore, in every manner of boat and raft.
Nicola 37:08
And it's a family, I look at them, I think, you know, I wish I could travel back in time and visit you. We don't always feel that way about our family, but I feel really fortunate with this family. They are a family that it would be amazing to have a conversation with. So, um, it would have been fun to hang out with. And the things we've noticed, there's similarities. I love rowing. Well, it turns out there's more than one picture of Monty, my grandfather, out rowing. So, and and all these pictures of overloaded row boats. I'm glad they all survive. So I'd like to start by reading a couple of poems about Maud, who...what I want to speak to -well, the poems will speak for themselves- is I grew up with her paintings, but I really didn't know who she was.
Nicola 37:55
My mother is 10 years younger than Rosemary the stories that she told, and you'll hear in the poem Maud was, when Maud died, my mother was seven. So there, it's a different version I have sort of also all the versions that I came into writing about the land, with is what was going on with the land at that time. So it's a different, at times, a journey of nostalgia and sadness. And as well as celebrating what was. So we'll start with celebrating, speaking of celebrating, celebrating Maud's painting...and I want to start with a quote from Nancy Braithwaite, who said granny hitched up her skirt and climb mountains, which I think is, as you know from listening to Briany, is so true about what she was doing, and it was so...
Nicola 38:47
"carrying a thermos of tea and a paint box filled with burnt sienna, Cerulean Blue, Poppet Jay Grey, Cobalt, Violet, Amber, Viridian Green, Naples deep Yellow, Transparent Red oxide and more. She trekked to where only the birds had speaking parts to contemplate the vast theater of the coast, the season's vagrant light across the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A spare brush, absent mindedly, stuck in her mouth, her hat down over her eyes, each of her hundreds of small paintings was a plein air caress across shorelines, bays, shallows, ocean straits, craggy igneous rocks, tiny islands. Coastal mountain ranges became miniature, snow capped hallelujahs. The lines of forested hills echoed the line of her shoulders her fingers mimicked the docks poking into shallows, her sable tip brushes arranged bands of land and sea onto cold pressed paper, receding rows of paling hills becoming her ethereal bodies, spilling backwards into a bone china sky."
Nicola 39:58
So the next poem. So I think I can just do this. The next poem that I wrote about Maud is based on a story that my mother told me about being there with her father when Maud was dying in 1943. As I mentioned, my mother was only seven at the time, and she didn't have a lot of memories of Maud, except that she was a friendly grandmother, always accompanied by her terrier. So...what I came up against as I wrote this poem, is I didn't really have a sense of Maud as a person, but...the poem, I compare her to Emily Carr, imagining Maud's traditional work transforms into faux paintings, which was the kind of painting that Emily Carr was exposed to when she went to Europe.
Nicola 40:48
And so I have them exposed. I have them turning into faux paintings, which would be looking like Matisse and actually the whole scene looking like a Matisse scene and catching fire. So I love Maud's work. You know, obviously I grew up with it, but I was curious about the differences between the women's art practice and what maybe would have happened to Maud had she gone off to Paris, had had that sense of freedom and gone off to Paris. And I had also been reading about the response to Emily Carr's work, how only, only the men went to Emily Carr's first art show after she showed her work after being influenced by what was going on in Europe, and the woman stayed outside to hear all about it.
Nicola 41:32
And then there was also a comment that my grandmother made once about Emily Carr, which I think is after I found the Emily Carr pot in my grandfather's pottery studio, which was, "oh, couldn't have tea with her, all those dogs and monkeys." So, apparently, society was divided into those one had tea with and those one didn't. And tea goes very deep, apparently. So here we go. So this poem is called mandarin orange, because in my mother's story, she said we went to buy oranges and then we went to visit Maud, mandarin orange, Victoria, 1943, so.
Nicola 42:16
"Starlings mob Gary oaks in the meadow behind my great grandmother's house. Inside my mother...inside my mother, age seven, stands at a bedroom doorway, fingers stained with juice from a mandarin orange, press of the terrier nose at her bare legs. Inside, amidst doilies on night tables, velvet curtains, her father bends over a mound beneath bedclothes that's Maud, his mother, dying. Her father, Monty, on leave from convoy duty in the Atlantic, carrying the ulcer that will kill him in a decade. My mother restless, stares up at Maud's painting of the Asulkan and Illecillewaet Rivers. Inaudible words between her father and Maud become white foam streaked with yellow among the crimson shadows on the rocks in a faux painting, my mother would be a paper doll with Kiss pearls in a white dress next to arabesque potted ferns. In the faux version, Maud's paintings on the wall would brighten and catch fire. I'm a pixelated post colonial light body floating above the mystery of Maud, whose journals give away so little. Gulf in Oak Bay, tea with Miss Pemberton, a sketching date, a walk with Arthur, in the photograph of her on the garden stairs, hat pulled over her forehead, skirt covering her knees, Her mouth is a shoreline, a river's edge. Did she have a desire like Emily Carr's, the roots of her soul, to dive down deep into the beloved earth mother? Emily, who returned so squint eyed from Paris, they said she let a sky roam wild across a gravel pit, a sky with the echo of feasts, of heavens and hell. In Maud's confluence of rivers, a blue Willow sky offers the mountains out, offers the mountains up, mystical lumps of sugar to be stirred into a postcard to Mother England. Maud, who wouldn't have had tea with Emily, because, as my grandmother told me, oh, all those dogs and monkeys. I'm moving around in the film that Maud is showing. Here's footage of the Gary oak meadow behind her house, silhouettes of trees dipped in evening blood, purple camas, Maud's eyes lost in hat brim shadow, a ceramic sky in shards above the meadow."
Nicola 44:44
So, as I may have, may have been quoted in some of the promotion which Ceri nicely did about this reading, I mentioned, if you cast the mythic imagination across the land. And everything will out. So unlike Lady Macbeth's situation, it wasn't the murder of a king that emerged. It was a little different. So what came out at that time, when I was writing, was some grief of loss. When I was writing, the land including the cottage was for sale by my uncle's family, and ultimately has sold, though there's still some, some family, one family member, one family branch, rather, on the land. And then I don't think anyone is here from the other branch...so I can read this poem. Okay, so this poem is called The Films The dead Are Showing. And the epigraph is from a poet, DC Waldrop.
Nicola 45:45
"Sometimes we hide from the films the dead are showing because we are no longer sure which side they're on. Quietly torn up, cricket violin. You walk past the well with its broken pump. The grass is long, the rattan on the chair on the front porch is untwisting. You peer in through diamond paned windows, glass so old it ripples, your reflection jackknifed by shards of ocean and orchard. Your mother's brother has died. It's rumored that his widow refuses to sell to anyone from the family, a cluster of bees sent from the quarter -excuse me- quarters up her brain buzz around, would if they could bar entrance to the kitchen with its high back chairs, pine table, shelves now empty of blue willow ware, but someone has left the wormhole door ajar. You walk into a pour of decanted light in the high beamed living room with its threadbare, Persian carpet, the beseeching arms of overstepped armchairs, the brick fireplace where your father's earnest "was he flushed?" proposal to your mother took place. To what extent does cartography bury the past? The map with curling edges left on the Pine table by the new owner doesn't even show the cabin, the flight pattern of bees through the orchard, or the films the dead are showing shuffling like a deck of cards, your great grandmother Maud at her easel beneath the leaning walnut tree. Arthur off in France buying race horses, her flower gardens flickering at turn of the century, black and white footage. The decades between her death in 1943 and now, compressed like a brick of black, pure tea. Your grandmother on the front porch with her four children, fine bone wrists revealed beneath her sleeves as she lifts her teacup from her knees and footage of you too: skinny legs, a frayed one piece bathing suit, shivering after swimming at the Shell Beach, your auntie saying "pumpkin, your lips are blue." Now that your trespass has bent your memories into ampersands. You want to wrap them into whatever lies closest at hand, a cobbled shroud, some shelf paper, a sleeping bag from up in the loft. You'll carry them to a hole you've dug among the roots of a Douglas fir, warm as the wing pits of ravens after a night's roosting. You'll dig there with a teaspoon for the rest of your life."
Nicola 48:24
So some poems are not written so much as they occur, they appear to us. The practice of poetry being as Robin, as poet Robin Blazer pointed out in his essay The Practice of Outside a Noetic Process, meaning that poetry has its own knowing. And if you are lucky and show up pen in hand or in front of the computer, the inspiration will come to you and lead you where you need to go, or sometimes I'll have to say where the poems need to go. You may not like where they're going, but they'll go. So the inspiration will come to you. Sometimes it takes you to some very uncomfortable places, which is why the Bolsheviks sent Mandelstam and other poets to Siberia, along with their artists and intellectuals. Poets have a habit of being candid, of speaking uncomfortable truths. The Japanese have a word for that, Ken Ho, meaning complete candor.
Nicola 49:24
So I kept the reins slapped and allowed the poems I wrote to arrive and be what they needed to be. And that took me to some uncomfortable places. So and many of you in this room have arrived at uncomfortable places light years ahead of me, as Briony certainly did, so. What follows is a personal record of my journey in the name of kennedoko, complete candor, a couple of quotes. Here are a couple of quotes related to history. "We are never as steeped in history as when we pretend not to be" and...this is a quote from, pardon me, I got to sing it up so that would be Michael Roth Trullo, hope I haven't butchered that name too badly. And coloniality.
Nicola 50:14
This is a quote from BC poet Sarah Delia, who I whose work I recommend. "Coloniality is a complex, intersectional, multi layered, incredibly busy process. It's often imagined and reimagined and taken up and moved backwards and then violently moved forward." So for me, after I decided to write about the land, what followed was a crash course in coloniality, Brownie invited me to attend a village workshop with her. I highly recommend these. And we walked the property together. At this point, it's down to...close to 40 acre property, and she showed me where the middens were and the burial grounds dating back over 7000 years up in the back of the property near a creek, which is interestingly, where the old shorelines used to be, that absolutely fascinated me, and what was most likely the village site on Beaver Point, or in the -sorry- up behind the Shell Beach. Is it there?
Nicola 51:16
Yeah, dispelling the myth that I had grown up with...that Salt Spring was just a summer visiting place, so yeah. So I just want to read you a couple of poems that followed after these visits with Briony on Salt Spring, and then I may check the time after that see how we're doing. Okay, so this poem is called Details of the Passage. It's an imaginary voyage to the land, which, well you'll see where it ends. And if it's a bit like karaoke, I never thought in my whole lifetime I'd be in a room reading my poems and actually have my poems up in the wall. So like karaoke, if you want to read along, that poem is right there. Okay, so Details of the Passage.
Christina Marshall 56:44
Never get between someone and their tea? That's what I say.
Nicola 56:48
You don't think we should? Yeah, did anyone want to? Anybody wanted to say anything? I want to keep you long because we do want to get to our tea. It's already it's already three. Oh my gosh, it's tea time.
Talk Attendee 56:59
It would be wonderful if everyone that is part of your family could stand up so we could see them.
Nicola 57:04
Oh, yeah, do you want to? We should get them up here for a picture. You want to come up for a picture? You guys? Yeah, this is we'll never be together like this, this is Murphy's Law.
Nicola 58:07
[indistinguishable talk, taking family photo]
Nicola 58:09
So thank you so much, everybody. This has been really...
Talk Attendee 58:25
Well done.
Christina Marshall 59:11
...some people haven't seen the exhibit, if people on the last row on each side could just take your chair and stack it on the one beside you, but let's not take time to stack all the chairs. Just make a bit more of an aisle around the sides. And just a couple of other housekeeping things. The library is closed, so the front door is locked. I mean, yeah, there's light, so if you go out, you can't come back in. So just let you know. And also you can access the washrooms, that should be open.
Briony Penn 59:45
That's a dream to be locked in a library.
Christina Marshall 59:48
[indistinguishable chatter]
Christina Marshall 59:48
You don't really have access to the library, but you have this room and tea at the back here. So yeah, that's it. Just make some room on the side.
