Small-Town Canadiana

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Heather Cline, "Cows for G," 2016

acrylic on panel, 24" x 36"

Regina artist Heather Cline is on a mission – to mark Canada’s 150th birthday with landscape paintings and audio recordings that honour small-town Canadiana.

Her 50 acrylics, Quiet Stories from Canadian Places, are on view until May 14 at the Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery in Saskatchewan. The show started in Yorkton at the Godfrey Dean Art Gallery and will travel to the Kelowna Heritage Museum in British Columbia, the Strathcona County Art Gallery @ 501 near Edmonton, and then back to Saskatchewan for a show at the Art Gallery of Swift Current, all before the end of the year.

“I’m offering it up as a dialogue with official history, says Cline. “I call it community history.”

The idea came to her a decade ago. Her favourite medium at the time was collage and she would glue newspaper clippings to her canvas before covering it with paint, allowing the printed text to bleed through. This created a physical connection between history and location.

With Quiet Stories, she took a different tack. “I really wanted to collect oral histories to create artwork,” she says. So, in 2011 she crisscrossed the country with a digital recorder asking some 200 Canadians about their family, work and home. Their responses inspired a flood of paintings.

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Heather Cline, "Backroad Okanagan," 2015

acrylic on panel, 24" x 36"

Some depict a specific place while others are more symbolic. Subjects range from urban streets, shops and historic houses to parks, highways and even a herd of cows. “I’m trying to paint them so they feel like a memory instead of a photograph,” says Cline.

Cline says it was hard to pitch the project to funding agencies – “it was massive and very difficult to explain” – so she tackled everything herself, including securing residencies and working out deals with galleries to show her work. “In some ways, the journey to make the art has been a performance-like encounter,” she says. She approached 15 communities. Half obliged with space, artist fees and exhibition venues.

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Heather Cline, "The Big Bump," 2016

acrylic on panel, 20" x 20"

She says the experience changed her approach to her art and to Canada. “For me, my art making has to be stimulated by some kind of connection to the place,” she says. “And I needed people who care about that place to translate it for me.” It worked. “Through their passion and love for the landscape, I started to see differently,” she says, adding that family and personal touchstones tie Canadians to the land. “It changed how I relate to the geography of our country.”