Canadian artist Heather Cline<\/strong> is on a mission – to celebrate the country\u2019s upcoming 150^{th<\/sup> birthday through a collection of landscapes and recordings that honour small town Canadiana<\/a>\u00a0and she\u2019s almost there. 34 acrylics are completed with 16 or more to go. (The final count will be between 50 and 60 pieces of various sizes). Called Quiet Stories from Canadian Places<\/em><\/strong>, the exhibition will tour western Canada to coincide with Canada’s sesquicentennial in 2017<\/a>.<\/p>\n}

<\/a><\/p>\n

Title: Apartment\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Cline knows quiet. She grew up in a small prairie town where the community was tight and nobody\u2019s story, whether an observation or an opinion, was unimportant. For Cline, people stories are the soul of the nation and a \u201cquiet\u201d show such as this honouring the community, is just as important, if not more so, than the big, formal celebrations officialdom has planned. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of an alternate parallel history,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m offering it up as a dialogue with official history. I call it community history.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Title: Edge of the City<\/strong><\/p>\n

Cline\u2019s favorite medium is collage. Earlier in her career, she glued newspaper clippings to her canvasses and then covered the under-painting with landscape, allowing the clippings to bleed through. Collage was her entry point into combining history with a sense of place. With Quiet Stories<\/em>, she took a different tack.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Title: Backroad Okanagan<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted to broaden my subject matter and my road to doing that was to care about a place and I needed people who care about that place to translate it for me.\u201d So she crisscrossed the country with a digital recorder interviewing folks along the way. Sometimes her subjects talked about a specific place; other times they talked about an event or an activity. \u201cOftentimes, somebody\u2019s small, simple story would talk about the fabric of our society and who we are,\u201d she says. \u201cThrough their passion and love for the landscape I started to see [their surroundings] differently.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Title: Morning Walk<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Title: The Big Bump<\/strong><\/p>\n

Her recordings inspired the paintings. Some of them are literal renditions of a specific place, others are more iconic, liker a country road or a waterfall. When presented in tandem with the paintings they inspire, the recordings will fill in the picture’s backstory. \u201cLayering audio on top of that is going to take [the viewer] to different places,\u201d says Cline. \u201cI\u2019m trying to paint them so they feel like a memory instead of a photograph,\u201d she says. \u201cIt might happen that the audio is near a painting it\u2019s related to but it\u2019s not essential. It\u2019s how I position one painting beside another and how I position that with the audio that will create the collage effect.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Title: The Falls<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Title: Walk in the forest<\/strong><\/p>\n

Cline came up with the idea of a mixed-media birthday show in 2014 and has been working at it nonstop ever since, securing space for herself across the West as an artist -in \u2013residence, raising funds, working deals with galleries and organizing the final tour. To say Quiet Stories<\/em> is a grass roots enterprise is an understatement. Cline has done all the hard slogging herself. Not that it hasn\u2019t been fun or enlightening.\u00a0The residents of Inglis, Manitoba, for instance, a village of 200 souls west of the provincial capital, organized a pie sale to pay her artist\u2019s fee. \u201cThey did pretty well,\u201d she laughs. \u00a0There\u2019s been a lot of whimsy and serendipity along the way,\u201d adding she\u2019ll repay the gesture by opening her show in Yorkton, Saskatchewan, just across the border from Inglis, January 16^{th.<\/sup> \u00a0Shows in the many towns she visited will follow, a labour of love from an artist that loves her country.<\/p>\n}

<\/a><\/p>\n

Title: Inglis<\/strong><\/p>\n

+\u00a0Heather Cline<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Canadian artist Heather Cline is on a mission – to celebrate the country\u2019s upcoming 150th birthday through a collection of landscapes and recordings that honour small town Canadiana\u00a0and she\u2019s almost there. 34 acrylics are completed with 16 or more to go. (The final count will be between 50 and 60 pieces of various sizes). Called […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":46394,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[88],"tags":[7850,7766,7851,7849,6954,7852],"yoast_head":"\n