“They take me on trips,” says Victoria landscape painter Anne Meggitt. “Shireen will book us somewhere to stay and Brett will do all the driving.”
Road trips are commonplace for Anne, her youngest daughter, Shireen, and son-in-law, Brett, as they scour Vancouver Island for Anne’s next project.
“It’s wonderful because when we get there often you have muddy slopes to climb up and down and they hang onto me. My sense of balance isn’t very good and if I’m standing on a steep path leading down, I need Shireen to hang onto me, so I feel firm. This is a new stage in my life. In the past, I’ve done it all by myself.”
She has, indeed, done it all herself. Married to a British government surveyor after art school, Anne has lived an adventurous life. Her husband’s postings took her to Swaziland, Uganda, Kenya and Malaysia. Later, on her own, she travelled to France, Spain, Ireland, the Australian Outback and the Orkney Islands. Always on the move, she adapted well to facing the unknown, but it was while stationed in remote parts of Africa and make-shift bush camps that her courage was put to the test.
“I couldn’t really plan my life,” she says. “I never knew moment to moment what I might have to cope with. I just keep going really.” She admits things were dangerous, like waking up in the night to find a huge cobra in her North Borneo bedroom. “I’ve had malaria and tick-bite fever,” she continues. “I had to put up with a lot, but I think it probably did me good.”
She painted when she could, committing the landscape to posterity and not just any landscape but copses, thickets and coulees, anywhere that harboured her favourite subject matter – trees. Trees are a passion she developed while growing up in the English countryside during WWII. The family home bordered on a wooded expanse.
“A large garden led to a wooded area, where I climbed trees and played among the bracken,” she recalls. “Along the lane, a path led down to the meadows, where cows munched among cowslips and kingfishers darted along a narrow river beside a large wood full of bluebells. I spent a lot of time wandering about. You could walk for miles and never see another person. Later, I would do a lot of drawing down there.”
At 13, Anne went to boarding school and started illustrating her notes. “I was drawing away in my textbooks,” she says. But it was trees that fascinated her, not only because they reminded her of an idyllic childhood but because of their elemental nature.
“I like watching how plants grow, how Nature makes them do interesting things. And while my paintings are often about trees, they are just as much about the act of painting. I’m a great believer in every brush stroke being exactly where it should.”
In 1977, the family moved to Canada, this time to Regina where Anne enrolled in several classes with legendary Canadian abstract painter Ted Godwin. “If you stand close to my paintings, they are very abstract and when you stand back from them, they come together,” she says. Anne’s recent works, 18 large canvasses, were exhibited at Victoria’s Martin Bachelor Gallery last September.
Today, at 87 years of age, Anne’s calling has become a family affair. She paints at Shireen’s and lives at Amanda’s, a graphic designer who created Anne’s website and art catalogues. Her other two daughters, Corinna and Cassandra, live in the UK and Australia, respectively. Anne’s son, Warren, lives in California.
“I’m not looking for anything specific. It just happens,” Anne says of the moment she decides to paint a particular scene. “My eyes are never stopping. I’m looking at things in a painterly manner. I’m not making a particular effort to do any of this. It’s almost beyond me.” The scene can be a nearby landmark or, more often than not, the result of a road trip orchestrated by Shireen and her husband Brett. “If Brett’s driving, I just say please stop here.”
Stepping out of the car, Anne takes black-and-white photographs (in the past she would have made drawings) and pastes them together to make a referential map to give her an idea of light, shadow and form. Turning those notes into something tangible takes place in her studio, a space Shireen has carved out for her mother in her Victoria home.
“Once I have breakfast (Anne lives in Amanda’s basement suite 10 minutes away from Shireen), I come here and paint. I’ve already decided what I’m going to do. I’m all set and ready to go. I use cadmium red to rough in some guidelines. I use it to mark approximately where things are set, especially tree trunks and the like, to get the composition bones put in.”
Then Anne adds colour, meticulously mixing her own paints. “I don’t use greens from the tubes, “she says, preferring to make her own. She paints two hours a day, Monday to Friday and she doesn’t see herself slowing down. Sure, her balance isn’t what it used to be, but that’s where her kids step in. Living in one daughter’s house and painting in the other, makes life so much easier.
“She’s not ashamed of hanging onto the rail,” says Shireen about navigating the entrance to her mother’s suite. “Some people say, ‘I didn’t need that before and I don’t need it now,’ but Mum has a bit of vertigo, so she’s going to hang onto that stick every time she goes up those three stone steps. There’s no shame in those changes. She’s just accepting of who she is, how old she is and where she’s at in her life.”
“She’s always in the moment and I really respect that about her. Nothing fazes her and she’s always ready for anything,” adds Amanda, mindful of her mother’s colourful past and adventurous spirit.
Accustomed to making the best of whatever life throws her way, Anne doesn’t see herself as being particularly heroic. She’s only doing what she’s always been doing and having fun doing it.
“I just want to keep on painting, making sure I pace myself,” she says. “I did Tai Chi for over 10 years in Regina and I still do bits of that to help with my back. I don’t have any major medical problems. I’m not on medication. I keep all my energy for my painting.”
When asked if painting has helped her cope with life’s unforeseen challenges, she replies “it’s never been an escape for me because it’s with me all the time. It’s mine,” she says proudly. “Forever.”
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