My "drop" of colour celebrates Black History Month

My mother and the generations before her preferred to emphasize their English ancestry, and then their Scottish.  There's plenty of both.

My mother herself was a brilliant woman and constant reader, but without what I would call an education in "critical thinking." She read historical novels and believed she knew history by piecing together facts from here and there, not infrequently mixing fact with fiction.

Perhaps unfortunately for her, I inherited her mind, yet I had the opportunity to go to university where I was taught to think more rationally.

Mom told me often when I was a child that the reason her Grandmother Sarah's skin was brown was because the Spanish Armada were shipwrecked off the coast of Devon.  Now, wait a minute, I would think.  Why is she bothering to even bring this up and then to give me a reason?  I wasn't asking.

As an adult I learned that this famous shipwreck happened in 1588.  As an explanation for my Great-grandmother's brown skin colour, it's far-fetched, to say the least.  But long before this time, I was putting 2 and 2 together whenever I found facts concerning the Underground Railroad to Canada.  The people I've met, the books I've read are too many to talk about here.  But below is a picture of my Great-grandmother with my Grandmother's eldest child,


and this is the black cameo she is wearing in her formal portrait.  I wear it today.  My great-grandmother was clearly marrying white, although she had to choose an alcoholic husband to do it.














The telling details of who she was are to be found without much difficulty by reading between the lines of my mother's family ancestry document.  Sarah's father, Arthur Parsons, arrived in Port Hope, Ontario with his wife and 8 children in 1847.  The Parsons came from Devon, England.  (Remember the Armada story?)   If Arthur's English wife were really Sarah's mother - and she looks not a bit like her, but instead has the stern, tight-lipped look of an Englishwoman - then she would have given birth to Sarah at the age of 48.  Highly dubious, I should say.

But most telling of all is the Probate of Arthur Parsons where he leaves everything he has to his 8 English children, but nothing at all to Sarah.

The will shows that Sarah was not seen as legitimate.

Sarah was very skilled at needlework, and I like to think that her work tells a tale.  Sarah favoured the more African zigzag in her early work, each monogrammed with a family last name initial.

But she also sewed a most delicately-lace-trimmed handkerchief for herself when she became a young bride, perhaps legitimizing her English status as the wife of blue-eyed Englishman, Richard Bellamy.

 

This geometric cut-work linen tablecloth is my favourite piece of all that I have that has survived.  It has a different aesthetic altogether.

 

 

 

Yet here is a delicate lace trimmed handkerchief embroidered by Sarah with African violets, as they were called.  You don't see these tiny, furry-leafed flowering plants much these days, but in my Grandmother's day their small purple blooms provided welcome winter colour.

 

 

Finally, here is Sarah's family portrait with her English husband and 5 surviving children.  Sarah, the Mother, takes pride of place in the centre of this formal group.  On the right-hand side are the 2 boys, the younger girls are to the left.  Each child has some trait she or he clearly inherits from Sarah.  Just in case you're wondering about my own tale, since you have seen how Celtic I look, my grandmother is the little girl in the middle, the most English-looking of them all. 

 

 

This photo is just a black-and-white reproduction, and so the original sepia tones have been lost.

 

"Doesn't it make sense that after 400 years of living on the same continent, in the same cities, in the same neighbourhoods...that we're all having children that are ...both one thing and "the other?"

Further Discoveries re my Celtic Heritage

I want to wrap up this portion of my blog posts here, if only to avoid straying too far from its original theme of my own work as an Interior Designer, and all forms of art and architecture relating to it.  But, after all, there really are only 6 degrees of separation between all things.

I mentioned in my blog on Scottish Stone Masons my paternal grandfather, William R. Dewson.  His life was full of more sorrow than I could have imagined.  I have recently learned even more about it on Ancestry.  I already knew a great deal because when my father died, he left detailed family photo albums of early family history, as well as his own hand-written stories.

As the eldest son, my grandfather, William Dawson, left a life of great family turbulence and poverty to board a ship called the "Sarnia" from the major port of Liverpool, near his home in Lancaster.  He was just 11 years old!

He landed in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

He next can be found in Ontario, working as a labourer, a single man in his 20's.  He had, by then, changed his family name from Dawson to Dewson.  Then, the lure of Western Canada led him to make his way there where free homesteads of 100 acres were being offered by the Crown.  He settled near Colgate, Saskatchewan, a young man with no knowledge of farming whatsoever.  Here is where my Dad's detailed oral history (which I have in abundance) picks up.

Long story short, William died in a fierce December blizzard when my father was just 7 years old.  My father and his 5 siblings were sent to The Oddfellows Home, an orphanage run by the Freemasons, whom I mentioned in my earlier blog about Scottish Stone Masons.  The farm was sold to pay for their keep.

My father's mother, Myrtle Rae Reid had died shortly before of "scarlet fever" which we now know as a bacterial infection beginning as strep throat.  Her death must have been excruciatingly painful, and both of Dad's parents died in the same year during the icy grip of a prairie winter.

The loss of his wife and the mother of his children must have been deeply painful to William, who had left his own mother at the age of 11.

While researching my father's history I didn't expect to find much, since Dad was an orphan.  However, I found that his mother had a long and stable family history.  Myrtle's father was an Engineer and the family had strong and early roots in Bay City, Michigan.  The Reid family reached back to one small area in north-eastern Scotland, Glenbuchat, Aberdeenshire for generation upon generation. 

My brother and Dad's oldest son is named Reid.  I named my only son Reid.  Reid means "red," or red-haired.

In his will, my grandfather William Dewson left an enormous, leather-bound Bible with gilt-edged pages (which must have cost this poor man a great deal) and his watch to be kept for my father, his oldest son, also named William R. Dewson.  My brother Reid is now its keeper.  He also specified that his 6 children were to be adopted as one whole family, which of course never happened.

My father's lifetime hobby was collecting and preserving photo albums and family history.  It's even more clear to me today that he did this because his own father endured so much sorrow in a lifetime made up of continual loss of family. 

As a side-note, the family name Dawson, while seeming to be English, dates back to Normandy and the conquest of England by William the Conqueror in 1066. 

These people from across the channel were also Celts.

Classic design or trend?

Interior Design follows fashion in its immediacy.  At this moment in time, fashion trends are moving at breakneck speed.  However, very few can afford to change their interiors this quickly.

In the 90's and early 2000's we were told that we needed a neutral interior to come home to after a long and hectic work day.  We even lined up our artwork along the walls in neat rows, all framed in black, and all identical in size!

Next came the term "pop of colour."  Interior Designers put a toe into the waters of colour by adding a few bright objects, but still within a neutral interior.

But now we are finding Designers having more confidence to expand their repertoire with use of colour.  What we are beginning to see is experimentation with layers of colour throughout the room.

I have just described some colour trends.  However, Interior Design concepts are classic, and they remain constant.  The rules may be broken, but the underlying principle is unchanging.  Simply put, the room needs a sense of harmony, as difficult as this may be to achieve.

Adding colour into the mix adds to the difficulty of achieving this harmony.  This is because each

object in the room has a weight due to various factors: its scale in proportion to the size of the room and ceiling height, its actual size, its placement in the room, its contrast with other objects surrounding it, and, very significantly, its colour.

Classic design creates a calming feeling of harmony, whatever neutral or colour is used.

The Art of Scottish Stone Masons

"They had Stone Age technology, but their vision was millennia ahead of their time.  5,000 years ago the ancient inhabitants of Orkney, a fertile, green archipelago off the northern tip of modern-day Scotland erected a complex of homes and monumental buildings unlike anything they had ever attempted before." - National Geographic, August 2014.

"Life in Stone Age Orkney was far more refined than once imagined.  The well-built homes at Skara Brae, Europe's most complete Neolithic village, included stone hearths, beds, and cupboards."

The tradition and craft of stone masonry continued throughout Scottish history.  In medieval times guilds, similar to unions today, were formed to protect the interests of the stone masons.  This guild survives today in the form of the society of Freemasons.  My grandfather Dewson who was born in the north of England near the Scottish border joined the Freemasons - rather than a church - when he came to homestead in Saskatchewan, Canada in 1905.

In Scotland, the superb artistry of the stone masons is evident.

This is a knotted rope around a window of the Wallace Monument.  Wallace is a Scots hero and legend.

This is a statue in Edinburgh representing Canada.  Scots were among the first settlers to our country, and they brought their craft with them.  They constructed many of our finest and most important buildings out of the plentiful and varied stone they found here.

This is The Centre Block with the Centennial Flame at Canada's Parliament Buildings in Ottawa.  It is known as one of the finest Gothic structures in North America, and was near completion around 1865.  Many quarrymen and stone cutters from Scotland where the trade flourished were imported to meet the demands of its construction.

Stone from Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Manitoba as well as some from Europe and the U.S. was brought to the banks of the Ottawa River to build this magnificent monument.

Scottish stone masons and their artistry have left their enduring mark on grand buildings in important cities across our province of Ontario.

Manifesto

I began my Google+ website on March 8, 2014, with doubt.  I wanted to post only my own work, and my own thoughts.  This was not to be a Pinterest-style blog, with images borrowed from more famous Designers.

So I called it "Classic Design or Trend,"  because, after a lifetime of developing both my visual and linguistic skills, I saw the light!  All of my work is valid, not just what appears as the latest example of a trend I might have riffed off.  If it's valid, then ergo it's valid.

My mother had exceptional artistic talent which she never used professionally.  I absorbed through my skin the ambience of every environment she created.  Like her, I have "perfect pitch in colour."  I have always been able to discern the components of any mixed colour, just by looking at it.  I also have her impeccable ability to place three-dimensional objects spatially in perfect harmony.

I want to show you the 3 sides of a clay pot my daughter painted for me long ago, and which always sits where I can see it daily.  No one but me knows this, but I turn the pot to one of its 3 sides, according to what I'm going through emotionally and spiritually at any given time.  This pot shows Sacred Symbols of the Celts.

I am genetically mostly Celtic, with many drops of "the other," since my family has been on this continent for a long, long time. I have a feeling for this land.

I have been through a period of Fire, where at my age of maturity, I began to gather up all of my experiences and skills gained through my lifetime into a whole. 

The process of doing so involved much introspection and often excruciating pain, descending into the belly of the whale, if you will.  I was alone with my thoughts and the meditations of my heart for a long time.  This is The Cauldron of Rebirth.

 

 

I emerged from this trial to fully own The Mother Goddess.  Now my passions work together in complete congruency.  Notice the dark centre of our power as women which the Celts knew to worship.  We are the symbol of the night, the mystery of the unknowable, and the source from whom all forms originate.  We are the black in the yin/yang which contains the white dot.

 

We are beyond all distinctions and we dwell in the realm of love.

 

   

Representing African Heritage: Genius Reinvented

Owen Gordon has worked with Mokonde wood carvers from Africa in a cultural exchange program in Jamaica.  He has developed an internationally recognizable form of unique, elongated, carved wooden figures.

Owen's first one-man exhibition of sculpture was held at the Creative Arts Centre. U.W.I., St. Andrew, Jamaica.  His paintings and sculpture have been exhibited in several international art shows in England and the U.S.

Representing African Heritage featured many of Owen's vivid paintings and sculpture.  Owen also created 7 black pedestals to display his work, 3 long and tall, and 4 shorter and wider.  These pedestals were made to perfection, with the highest level of craftsmanship.

The aim of Representing African Heritage in Contemporary Art was to show that the genius of Africa continually reinvents itself, while retaining the vibrant palette, the ease of geometry, the mastery of abstraction, the sense of great energy in containment that are the unique properties of African art.  Its aim was to excite your eyes and kindle your imagination.

Here is one last, long, look at a powerful assemblage of Owen's sculptures on their pedestals.  His work filled most of one of the three galleries that took up one entire floor at 80 Spadina for this historic exhibit, the first of its kind in Toronto to celebrate Black History Month, in February 1995. 

I produced all aspects of Representing African Heritage in Contemporary Art with the partnership of Hollis Baptiste aka Awalay.  This historic show paved the way for all future corporate-sponsored art exhibits later assembled to honour Black History Month.  Similarly inspired exhibitions now occur with regularity every February.

Be sure to watch for these this coming month, Black History Month, February 2015.