0:05

so thank you everyone for coming today in person and online um this is a truly

0:10

remarkable turnout and i think um just testament to

0:15

mod lewis’s legacy and her ability to continue to delight and to attract

0:21

all sorts of viewers so this exhibition was organized by the mcmichael canadian

0:27

art collection which is in kleinberg ontario near toronto and it was curated by their chief

0:34

curator sarah milroy so i’m here the project manager the one who oversaw its installation

0:40

and this show has been traveling across the country for about two years

0:46

and it brings together nearly 140 paintings by the iconic um east coast

0:52

painter mod lewis so it is a really amazing opportunity to see so much of her work together to see how her

0:58

practice progressed over time and here in the west

1:04

it’s really nice to see so many of her paintings because as we know a lot of her work is still on

1:10

in the east coast in nova scotia um so

1:16

just let’s see here how many people have seen this show already just a few okay nice um how many people

1:23

have never seen mod lewis’s work okay a few okay

1:29

so hopefully um this will be uh lots of information for those of you unfamiliar with her practice and for

1:35

those of you who are familiar i hope you learned something too just one last show of hands who here has seen the film

1:41

moddy okay lots of people okay so that’s great so if you’ve seen the

1:47

hollywood film um or if you’re a little bit familiar with mod lewis’s practice um you probably know a little bit about

1:53

her story um particularly some of the hardships that she endured in her life such as

1:58

the chronic pain because of her arthritis or the difficulties in her marriage

2:05

but this show focuses less on sort of her background and those elements and

2:11

more on the art and the practice mud lewis as an artist so we have a lot of paintings brought

2:17

together that really showcase where she started and how she progressed

2:23

the show is organized to highlight the serial repetition in her work so it’s

2:29

organized around some of the most common themes we find in mod lewis’s paintings

2:34

including animals or the sea the harbor modes of transportation such as carts

2:40

carriages trains etc and this both highlights the themes that

2:46

were of most interest to mod lewis that she was painting but also what she was selling to her customers

2:52

one thing i want you to pay attention to as we move through the show is there will be a lot of paintings clustered

2:58

together that all look similar but no two are ever exactly the same

3:03

while there might be the same cats in several paintings she’s always changing the season or changing some of the

3:08

decorative elements in the image um so pay attention to that as we move throughout the show

3:15

so we’re gonna go in here um uh my lewis’s works are not that big and so it

3:20

is going to be hard for everyone to see at one time um but as we move around try to take a look at what i’ve talked about

3:26

um and sort of take turns i want to focus on first the first painting in the show and

3:33

the large photographic mural that you can probably see through the doorway i realized we’re going to create a little

3:38

bit of a bottleneck in the entrance so we’re going to try to spread out a little as you walk in take a look at those two things and that’s where we’re

3:44

going to start okay okay i think we have everyone

3:50

so um i want to start by looking at this painting behind a few of you here

3:57

this is one of the many paintings for sale signs that mod lewis would have created to put

4:03

on the outside of her house um it’s a bit unique for her work because it’s on a black background we

4:10

will see a few other examples of that but it’s not generally something she was doing but the effect here is that it makes for

4:18

a quite graphic image and of course the white and the yellow and the other colors really pop against that

4:24

background to attract um visitors so she lived on the side of a main road

4:31

in digby county nova scotia and mod lewis really did work for a market so she didn’t attend art school

4:40

she didn’t really participate in a greater sort of art world at the time she didn’t exhibit in galleries at the

4:45

time um or have a sort of community of artists

4:50

but she sold her paintings from the side of the road from her house so

4:56

mostly this was to locals um so to people who might have been driving by

5:01

visiting perhaps from halifax or to a lot of american tourists who were coming up to from the eastern united states

5:08

into the maritimes they were often buying her work as well

5:13

so this really does set up the context for the show the fact that mod lewis for her livelihood

5:20

and selling her works of art just beside this work we have this amazing uh enlarged photographic mural

5:28

um so as i mentioned for most of her career she was selling to those who were

5:34

visiting her house but around 1965 she was the subject of

5:40

two uh major features so one was a documentary by uh cbc and you can look

5:46

that up and watch it on the only some of the only footage of mod lewis actually working and talking about

5:52

her work and then this photograph was taken for an article

5:57

in a toronto publication in 1965 so this is only five years before her death

6:04

and some of the only sort of footage we have of mod lewis um or documentary imagery

6:10

and this is the house i’m referring to so you see a little bit of it there the house was if you’ve seen 12 and a half

6:16

by 13 and a half feet it wasn’t very big and she

6:21

as you can tell painted the outside of it so the door and the windows and this would again be a kind of other

6:28

marketing tool so people would be attracted to this bright and colorful house but she also painted the entire interior

6:34

so all the walls the furniture like the stove and um other items like the bread box

6:40

um which suggests to us too that she was painting um her the life around her to bring joy and

6:47

comfort to her own um setting um and house and so i like to think of the house as

6:52

the kind of one work that mod lewis made for herself the one work that wasn’t for sale um but was her own sort of piece

7:00

um so in 1965 she came to a lot of national attention uh because of these two

7:05

um um features and she started selling her work to

7:11

people across the country as well so some people might send her a letter in the mail and five dollars she always sold her paintings for five dollars

7:17

usually um and then she would mail off something like this um and at this height of popularity she

7:24

was actually painting two to three paintings a day so you can imagine she was selling quite a bit actually

7:30

i’m curious if anyone here happens to have ahmad lewis in their own collection

7:36

sometimes there’s someone often if you’re from the east coast that has um inherited one i met someone the other day she inherited it because it was in

7:43

her grandmother’s kitchen so um the i’ll just mention a little bit about the house as well so as i said it

7:50

was quite small and after her death and then her husband’s death

7:55

some years later it really fell into disrepair but there was a

8:00

big effort by the local community and the art gallery of nova scotia to

8:06

save and conserve to restore the house so for those of you who have visited halifax the houses on permanent display

8:13

in their gallery um but for those of us who don’t have the privilege to go there there is a

8:18

really amazing virtual tour online and you can get right into the house and click on little elements and be blown up

8:26

images and you can read about the pretty amazing i think 10-year conservation

8:32

efforts so i encourage you to take a look at that so this exhibition begins

8:39

not with one of these themed sections but with paintings from her earliest days so um from around the 1940s and

8:46

early 1950s we are going to let’s all kind of turn around we’re going to look at the very

8:51

first painting on the wall

9:00

okay so this is one of the very earliest pieces in the show now for those of you who are familiar

9:05

with mod lewis or you know maybe you’ve seen a reproduction of the cats before this doesn’t really look like that

9:11

um so this is you know one of her earlier experiments i would say

9:17

and the tone is a little bit darker than what we’re used to a part of that is because in her early

9:24

days she was using found materials so her husband was cutting boards for her from scrap

9:29

and she was using paint that they could find um and often times that might have been house paint or um boat paint um

9:36

because of the industry of fishing and boating where she lived and while she didn’t attend art school

9:42

as i mentioned she would have still been finding inspiration in other imagery so particularly popular media so i’m

9:49

thinking calendars wall calendars with images or magazines or this one really

9:54

has a postcard like aesthetic to it um and it’s a little bit more detailed too

10:00

than what we might expect from some of our other imagery so we have this very clear foreground with the girl um

10:06

jumping into the lake the mid ground and the background of the trees and the mountains and

10:13

it also seems a little bit generic we don’t know quite where it is to here in the west it kind of looks like a rocky mountain picture

10:19

so it might have been a scene she was familiar with but it was likely something she would have seen and then copied and made her own

10:26

um let’s move a little bit down and i’ll tell you a little bit about mod lewis’s upbringing and we’ll look at some more early pictures while i do

10:51

these are two um that you were just looking at nice examples um you can tell the paint has deteriorated a little bit

10:58

more um than a lot of the other works in this show and that is because of um some of those unstable material she was

11:04

using before she had got her hand a specific paints

11:10

so mod lewis was born ma dowley was her maiden name in 1903

11:16

in a rural area near yarmouth nova scotia and she was born into a really loving family

11:22

with her parents and her brother and they supported her interest in the arts so particularly she liked to play the piano

11:30

and to draw and paint her father was a blacksmith and a harness maker

11:36

and this is an important detail because in her later years when she’s painting she’s often

11:43

painting nostalgic images and you’ll see oxen or carts or black blacksmith and

11:49

leather making elements that she would have been familiar with from her father

11:54

um in her youth too her and her mother um would draw and paint christmas cards

12:00

and then they would sell these door-to-door in their community just as other people might sell canned goods or jam etc so that was really how she

12:08

started making art and we’re actually going to see some examples of that in a few minutes

12:13

um she was born with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and so in her teenage years this really started to

12:20

affect her spine and her hands in particular and it also made it difficult for her to seek work outside of the home

12:27

so she continued to live with her parents into adulthood um she did do some schooling she went up to about

12:33

grade five in her early teenage years and then in her early 30s both of her

12:39

parents passed away and she was left in a bit of a difficult position without much of a social safety net

12:45

so um seeking to sort of advance her position she answered an ad um a look an ad by a

12:52

local man and his name was everett lewis and he was looking for a live-in housekeeper um

12:59

now you can imagine that was his house it was 12 and a half by 13 and a half feet but he wanted someone to live there

13:04

and to clean and to cook he was an unmarried man so she answered the ad she walked i think 10 kilometers to get

13:11

there and he hired her but she didn’t want to move in without being married um and so

13:17

after a brief courtship the two of them got married in 1938 and she moved in and that’s where she

13:23

lived and sold her paintings until her death in 1970.

13:29

um so i just want to mention a few other of some of these early paintings

13:35

we can tell as i said some of the deteriorating paint but also some interesting elements that may have been

13:42

both a product of her imagination but also the fact that she was using whatever was available to her so she

13:47

might have not have had a wide range of colors for example so in this uh harbor image the

13:54

um the water and the sky are the exact same color of turquoise and in this one here the sky is yellow so my maybe not

14:00

what we would um typically think of um this wall too shows us some of the uh

14:08

subject matter that she’s interested in that then she’s going to start repeating as she matures towards that kind of

14:14

iconic style we know her for um also she lived her entire life in on

14:21

in between yarmouth and digby county which is only about 100 kilometers away and

14:26

she didn’t do much traveling so she painted the world she knew um and i just want to mention this one because this is

14:32

something i learned about this week not being you know being from alberta and not very

14:37

familiar with fishing or the ocean this is called drying cod flakes so when

14:42

i initially read that i thought um the flakes refer to the fish is anyone here from the east coast does

14:49

anyone know what a flake is can you describe it

14:55

yeah that you dry fish

15:15

yeah thanks yeah so the structure that is most typical would be kind of like an a-frame um i think and air could flow underneath

15:23

and after the fish have been salted they’re drying this is a more temporary structure

15:29

um that i think if you have an abundance of fish they would have built these and

15:34

they’re just as wide as someone can kind of reach across so you’ll see there’s only two rows of fish

15:40

and these are a lot of the kind of nostalgic elements that ron lewis is incorporating in her paintings

15:46

um so this is uh the sort of introductory section and we’ll move to the first

15:52

somatic section of the show which is all about animals so we’ll go look at some of the cats

15:58

okay so these paintings are um understandably so some of the fan favorites

16:04

um so i will say um when mod lewis married everett

16:10

um he was a fish peddler so he would go door-to-door selling fish and she started making her cards again and would

16:16

join him and would sell them and people start to to really take an interest in those cards i think they

16:22

were sold for about five cents a piece and um after that she started working on a

16:27

slightly larger scale so these could fetch a little bit more money and

16:33

as it became more difficult for her to work on a small scale with her hands with arthritis

16:39

working on a larger scale became a little bit easier and so these are some examples of work

16:47

from the late 50s and early 60s we never know the exact date but we can tell by how they look usually

16:53

um and you can see she’s really developing um the sort of her signature style

17:00

and the motifs that she incorporates so unlike that very first image we

17:05

looked at of the lake that kind of had this foreground mid-ground and background and

17:11

was quite detailed here um lewis is really flattening the image

17:16

so we don’t have that sense of receding space everything’s kind of brought up to the picture plane

17:23

and it makes for a really kind of graphic and poppy image something that would really attract people um to buy

17:29

she’s also developing this sort of economy of strokes so these elements that she’s always using um so

17:36

these bright yellow circles for the eyes the tulips which we’ll see a lot are

17:41

usually just two or three dashes of color and there’s always this lovely framing

17:47

element of the trees in this case of all the apple so they sort of frame that central

17:52

figure um and as i mentioned she’s starting to paint uh the same thing over and over

17:58

again but there’s always differences between them

18:04

um in her very later years when it became more difficult to paint she would actually use some stencils that her

18:12

husband everett would help her so then she might stencil in the central image

18:17

and then paint the rest of it behind and this is um both because of the faculty

18:22

in her hands but also remember she was selling two to three paintings a day in the height of her career in the mid 60s

18:28

so this becomes a method of producing more um and this wall i just want to mention

18:33

so we see a lot of farm animals which reference her upbringing but this is one of the sound of iconic mod lewis

18:39

flourishes is the blossoming spruce trees of course we know spruce don’t have beautiful bright pink flowers but

18:47

this is something she always did um and then we’ll just look at the oxen

19:00

i was um thinking this morning as i was walking my dog in the fresh snow that back in

19:06

february when it was really cold we were installing this show i was um really excited that the run of this exhibition

19:12

was going to coincide with spring um and of course on the spring equinox last week we had a

19:18

big snowstorm but then this week it was plus 20 and then we had more snow today which perhaps is actually most fitting

19:24

because mod lewis was painting all the seasons and sometimes we’ll notice that she was actually mixing the seasons up a

19:31

little bit so you might see really bright pink um or orange in some of the winter scenes

19:37

which we might not expect so similar to the cats um that are posed

19:43

kind of like a portrait these are the pairs of oxen now sometimes she was painting we’ll see later oxen that were

19:49

working um so maybe pulling logs but these are in a sort of more portrait format

19:55

they have a specific yolk style uh east coast part of me yolk style that

20:01

connects them by the back and um it’s a beautiful and decorative yolk style if

20:08

you look at pictures of it online and so this would have been something she was familiar with from her father who was

20:13

making um making things like this um again we have this beautiful framing

20:18

element of the trees um or the blossoms and so this is one we

20:24

have i think eight on display here but you can always see there are different um

20:29

seasons or different elements to the setting so she’s constantly combining and recombining the

20:35

elements of the picture to create the composition

20:41

now i want to move into the back room here and we’ll take a look at some harbor

20:48

scenes and i i should mention in i think 2020 i have the date here yeah in 2020

20:54

the oxen were on a postage tank so you might have seen the canadian postage stamp and and of course the one last

20:59

sort of mod lewis flourish just the long eyelashes um which some attribute to mod lewis’s sense of humor but also oxen and

21:07

cows if you look up close they have beautiful eyelashes um so i think that is uh staying true to the beauty of the

21:14

oxen here

21:23

so this section of the show is called by the seaside it’s all images of course of the

21:29

sea um so as mod lewis’s career is progressing

21:35

into the 50s and 60s she’s turning away from

21:40

copying any imagery or referring to images she might have seen in magazines and calendars and

21:46

developing the subject matter of most interest to her

21:51

always painting the world around her so exactly what she knew and saw and she’s of course very familiar

21:58

with the area of nova scotia so you’ll see how she is painting the high war

22:03

extreme changes in tide or the mud flats at low tide

22:09

and she’s often was creating a really nostalgic image of the east coast

22:15

um referring back to her youth and so you will see references to fishing or farming culture

22:22

that probably weren’t so popular in the 1950s and 60s when we have

22:28

technology and automation and other machinery kind of taking place but she’s often referring back to them

22:35

and this would of course been popular to our clientele and continues um to be popular today and i think it’s these

22:41

images in particular that really contribute to the sort of icon of mod

22:46

lewis um as a sort of image of the east coast um and this kind of imagery continues to be

22:54

sort of the marketing the touristic image of the area what i want to focus on in this room is

23:01

the way that mod lewis builds a scene or a composition how she really expertly

23:07

used color and shape to draw our eye in and move around the scene so this one in

23:13

particular it’s a quite maybe simple looking image there aren’t a ton of colors there’s mostly red white

23:21

black blue for the water but she’s using repetitive elements to

23:26

draw our eye in so of course we’re immediately um drawn to the central image of the

23:33

lighthouse and the white red and white building but then it’s repeated here in the boat and then here in the birds and then

23:40

again in the background so she creates this meandering um path through the image

23:47

using color and shape and often times we’ll have the mass of the boat or the wings

23:54

of the birds um sort of moving in the same direction to create this sense of movement or sort of waves throughout the

24:00

picture in the back corner there

24:05

[Music]

24:15

these images i really love for the color the striped fish barrels the lobster traps

24:22

so you’ll notice that the colors are becoming a lot brighter kind of punchier

24:28

and this is because as she’s selling she is gaining access to better materials

24:35

um around 1965 when that feature in toronto happened

24:41

she also came to the recognition of some other artists around the country particularly there was an artist in ontario who started mailing her pre-cut

24:49

panels so you’ll see that the paintings become a little bit more uniform in their shape and

24:56

artist quality oil paints and oftentimes she was working directly from the tube or putting the paint into

25:03

like old sardine cans and not mixing them on a pallet so we have these really bright and bold colors that are quite

25:10

different from the from the earlier work we saw i just want to also

25:15

kind of give a shout out to our education department so we created this kind of

25:21

small mod lewis playhouse but it was activated on two sundays we have

25:26

something here called all day sunday where people and families can come and experience the shows but also do some

25:32

hands-on activities and so i think we had over 50 people um inspire

25:38

paint the house so that’s there and then we have this card making station um as a nod to mod

25:45

lewis’s earliest work and people um can create their own postcard and leave it here uh or take it home with them to

25:52

send and we’ve been having seeing some really amazing cars made there

25:58

so we’re going to take a little bit of a walk in around the corner and i want to look at

26:03

another animal image and some of the christmas scenery um yes

26:14

okay i just wanted to quickly point out um the deer paintings because in particular

26:20

so this was another common motif of mod lewis’s is the two deer sometimes a stag and doe or a doe and fawn

26:26

like the cats where we have the mother and the kittens but this one in particular

26:32

i really love the sense of the scene so like the oxen in the cat where we have

26:37

that framing device mod lewis is taking it kind of a step further here um

26:42

and so we have the trees that frame the scene but it’s almost like a stage is set up and so we have the the two deer

26:50

facing away from us and into this quaint village um almost as if they are characters um on the stage or actually

26:57

they’re mimicking our viewing position and this was i think common for mod

27:03

lewis uh to you know surrounded by animals growing up and loving them to often paint these

27:08

harmonious images of animals and people or nature and culture

27:14

um and these are all winter scenes which relate to everything behind us which is all about christmas um so we have a

27:21

bunch of mod lewis christmas cards they’re quite small so i encourage you to kind of walk around and take a look

27:27

at them these are not from her uh earliest days as a child i i don’t know if those exist

27:32

i imagine it might be somewhere but they’d probably be hard to track down these are more from the early 1940s when

27:39

she was making the cards with her husband and selling them door-to-door i’ll just mention this is a clip from the film

27:46

moddy from 2017 it is a hollywood depiction um this is about five minutes long we’ve

27:51

just turned down the sound for the sake of the tour but this shows um maude and everett in

27:58

their early sort of years together when uh he is selling fish and she is trying

28:05

to sell her cards and they have one customer who’s taken a real liking to them and ordered her um to make a much

28:12

bunch more and is offering her more money so it nicely relates to the christmas cards we’re about to look at

28:26

so the christmas cards in particular really show um a range of mod lewis’s style and

28:33

material so the early one she’s using ink and watercolor um

28:38

and inscribing them in the sort of beautiful penmanship she would have learned in

28:44

school and later she’s using gouache and sometimes there’s these elements too

28:50

like this one in the middle here with a bow now i don’t know if that was added by the person who bought the card or

28:55

sent the card or if mod lewis did that but it’s a really nice um element

29:02

we also again see mod lewis’s sense of humor in some of the cards so over on that wall um we have a group of children

29:09

skating and one has fallen on their bum um and

29:15

someone i gave it to her the other day and someone pointed out um that all of the cards related to christmas are all

29:21

about sort of fun winter themes and we don’t see any religious elements in the cards and i don’t quite know why or the

29:28

context um but i think that was a really interesting observation so you’ll notice that as you go through

29:35

kind of the feature of this room though are these amazing window shutters so

29:41

these are the other works we have here painted on black and particularly the white and the red

29:46

really pop on these black backgrounds so sometimes mod lewis did commissions and this is an example of that this is

29:53

the largest commission she did both um in terms of how many paintings but also the size she didn’t usually paint

30:00

vertically so this is um a bit unique and also mod lewis was a quite small

30:06

woman um so these would have been a pretty large scale work um for her to paint

30:11

so there was a family in the area an american family who

30:17

had a vacation home and they asked mod to paint two sets of

30:22

shutters we’ll see the others in a moment one set for summer and one set for winter

30:29

so here we have a lot of christmas themes of the snowmen um

30:34

and the candy cane but also some of uh the whimsical elements that lewis added uh

30:41

like the yellow and pink butterflies which we wouldn’t you know enter

30:47

but i also want to point out that one which is quite incredible so we have this rotund

30:52

snowman his stogie his argyle socks the bright red lobster ready for a holiday meal but

31:00

he’s holding a tray of drinks cups and the bottle in the center says tnt so i

31:05

think this is mod lewis’s warning about the risks of over consumption at the

31:10

holiday season and you know we don’t see too much of that in our paintings this sort of maybe moral element or a

31:16

critique societal critique um so i quite liked that one these paintings have undergone some

31:24

major conservation work but they are in pretty incredible shape for something that um you know would have been handled

31:30

frequently and exhibited outside for so long one other thing we have in this room

31:35

which is uh kind of special is here

31:41

this is another early one we don’t actually know the date um but it’s painted on a cake pan

31:47

so painting a christmas card she was also sometimes painting these functional objects which is a real pho

31:54

or our tradition and at one point there was a woman who owned

31:59

a beauty shop in yarmouth and uh she would sell her and her mother’s cards

32:04

and some of these other painted wares so that’s the only example we have in the show and of course um she would have

32:12

this in her own home okay so this section of the show is called from here to there

32:19

so it is all about getting from one place to another um whether that is by

32:25

carriage or strong carriage we also see some carts that farmers are using we see some cars

32:32

and some trains we have images of the carriage and again these

32:39

are quite a nostalgic image oftentimes it’s children going to a one-room school house for example

32:46

um but i do again want to point out the way that mod lewis is building this

32:52

composition so we always have the carriage that immediately draws our eye in

32:59

and then the covered bridge and then back to this village so again this kind of sweeping sense of movement

33:06

the village however is usually at the base of a hill or some trees so that kind of flattened space rather than

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receding forever and that is uh common in mod lewis’s paintings

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what is really nice about a lot of these though is that we have this sense of a heightened point of view a little bit

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above the image and so it’s almost as if we are in a carriage too kind of barreling in behind them down this hill

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and in into the scene um i quite like to haul mod lewis in

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this one for example um she just parts the trees a little bit

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so you can see that orange house so there’s always this focus on the repetition of these bright colors

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throughout the scene now i want to look at this painting in the corner

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i’m going to use my notes here so i don’t forget the details so this is a really

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in the show because it is it’s an early work um from about 1949 or 1950

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it is a depiction of a historical scene and of something happening in the u.s so

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unlike everything else we see where mod lewis is really only painting what she sees and knows and the world around her

34:22

this is neither of those things um so i’m led to believe that it could have

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been a commission um or i suspect something that she painted because she read about this um moment in history

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maybe in a magazine or a newspaper so the date may 14th 1851 is uh inscribed

34:42

right on the painting which gives us a hint to what is going on and then the train says erie

34:48

so this is the erie train um the erie railroad road at one time was the

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longest in the world construction began in 1835 and it

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connected the hudson river near new york city to the west shore of lake erie at

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dunkirk so it was 450 miles

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it was completed in may and on the inaugural trip

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from one place to the other the president of the time president phil moore and members of his cabinet

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rode the train and the report goes that he sat outside on this flat deck for the

35:29

two-day journey and had this blanket or steamer rug on his lap and a jug of

35:36

rum the only thing that is missing is that jug of rum in the painting at least i haven’t seen it

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so this is a historical scene but of course mod lewis was also including um some of her characteristic elements so

35:47

we have all the tulips and the blossoming tree again

35:53

and then i want to point out these cars there’s only two cars in the in the show and i really love these images this is a

36:00

model t ford um now the couple in the car are

36:07

you know painted too generically to determine if it’s a self-portrait but everett did have a model t

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briefly in the beginning of their marriage and they would ride around when he was selling um fish eventually he got

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a different occupation and sold the car um so i imagine that this is um a kind

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of memory of of that time and the freedom of traveling around by car

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um mod and everett lived in that small house for her until her death um they had no running water no

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electricity so you can imagine um the kind of luxury that this car would have been and of course i love that she lines

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these sort of back rows of the county um with these bright blossoming tulips

36:52

so we have here the complementary shutters to the winter ones so these are the summer shutters um painted with big

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bouquets um pins and birds and then we have some other summer themed paintings and this

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one in particular um is quite sweet this is however quite unlike a lot of

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the other imagery we saw and it’s the only one in the exhibition maybe the butterflies are sort of

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similar but it’s a really quite flat image there’s no sense of space or depth or

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um and it almost has this wallpaper like quality like you could imagine it being repeated and put on a wall

37:32

um the black cap on the goldfish’s finches indicates that they’re male goldfinches

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and this is likely a kind of scene that she might have seen in her own yard for example

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so while this isn’t maybe typical of the imagery that she was selling a lot of or painting a lot

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it has become a quite reproduced and iconic image of mod lewis’s and is similar to what she was painting on her

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house so if you go look at the house again at the front you’ll see she was often adding sort of birds and flowers

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to her walls and windows so that brings us to the end of the tour

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if you have any questions i’m here to answer them i hope you’ve learned a little bit about mod lewis and her work

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and thank you again for joining

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