Alberta Wheat Pool Hay Lakes
Artwork Description
In 1994 Alberta Wheat Pool chose one of my elevator watercolor paintings to feature on their annual calendar, which they distributed to elevator operators to give to their customers and grain growers as one of their public relations gambits. They liked my rendition of Innisfree because it gave a different perspective on these prairie giants, and they produced a few thousand of them, and gave me a hundred or so for my own personal use. The view on the calendar was similar but slightly different from the recent painting done for this miniature show.
Interestingly, I had been traveling the country photographing train stations, which were being abandoned, decommissioned, and demolished back in the ’70s and 80’s… And being a sort of country boy at heart, I also started including elevators in my photo sorties, especially the beautiful wooden ones, little knowing that they too would soon become relics and a distant memory. I consider myself fortunate to have had the foresight to capture as many Alberta elevators as I could. And now I’m trying to preserve their memories in the only way I know how.
And of course, I hope that those who buy my paintings will get the same pleasure of owning them as I do painting them and will have for themselves a small connection to our rural past. And of course, I could not overlook Hay Lakes, because I passed by it so often on trips to Three Hills and Trochu, places that I had frequented while growing up and from where my wife came from. I have painted the elevators at Hay Lakes a number of times, but always in watercolor. Now I’m giving them a whirl in acrylics—-less subtle but in a way more vibrant Sadly, they are no longer there.
