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Worthwhile Canadian Art
Can a Twitter account of Canadian paintings save the country?
If you want to know a country, look at its art. This is the advice the curator of the Twitter account @CanadianPaintings once gave as a tour guide in Europe. It’s advice she now thinks Canadians might well consider taking, too. But that’s not why she first started the Twitter account, just to be clear.
“How it started was, I’m a teacher, and I had a Twitter page for my teaching and I just enjoy art. So, every time I saw art pop up on my screen, I’d be happy,” she told me recently. “Then I thought, none of the art that I’m seeing is from Canada, it’s all international art. I couldn’t find anyone to follow that had Canadian art. So I thought, well, if no one’s putting it out there, then I’ll put it out there.”
So, she began adding art to her personal feed. Then her younger sister suggested a standalone account. Why not just the art? Just Canadian paintings.
“I started it at Christmas holidays in 2018 and… nobody really paid attention,” she said. “Then, the 2019–2020 school year, I went and taught in a fly-in community in Northwestern Ontario. And just living up there and seeing a very different part of Canada that I’d ever seen before, understood before, it really made me think about our country and think about the different ways people live in our country, and that sort of kept me going.”
Now, it keeps everyone else going at a rate of about a half-dozen paintings posted per day. The account is, according to some of its 72,000-odd followers, a timeline cleanse. It brings “so much peace” and “quiet in all the noise.” It is “a balm for the soul.”
And, this being Canada, where six degrees of separation is reduced to maybe three, sometimes the paintings featured spark even more intimate reactions.
“Vaughn is a dear friend and instantly recognizable in this photo,” someone noted, retweeting Victoria Joyce’s Woodworker, Paddle Maker, Vaughn Alec Dunfield, a detailed close-up of a man’s hands whittling. “After a nearly-deadly farm accident, my Great Grandpa (holding my Grandpa) decides to leave farming forever in northern Saskatchewan,” another — Alex Glista — wrote, retweeting William Kurelek’s The Glista Story, in which a man cradles a…
