Memorial For Margaret 2013
THIS FRIDAY @ La Petite Mort Gallery:
MEMORIAL FOR MARGARET / June 14, 2013
Galerie St Laurent + Hill Gallery: 5 – 7pm
Photographs of Margaret by various photographers / http://galeriestlaurentplushill.com/
La Petite Mort Gallery: 7 – 10pm
Paintings created by Margaret.
Viewings of Don Winklers’s “Margaret
& Evergon” (the film) viewings at both galleries.
Calender Girl: Paintings by Margaret Lunt @ La Petite Mort Gallery
Statement:
Every Friday morning at 8:50 am Margaret would board a special bus that would then pick up other participants in one of Montreal’s community program for the elderly. After its long, circuitous journey the bus would drop them all, Margaret included, at the CLSC Centre d’hebergement Èmilie-Gamelin, just across the park from where she lived with her son, Evergon.
Never having touched a brush, under the tutelage of Colette Milot from Chambly, Quebec, Margaret reveled for the last three years of her life in being a “Sunday” painter. She joined a small group of others who were eager to give up low-impact exercises and group games to indulge in the quiet pleasures of painting. Margaret, for her subject matter, chose to be inspired and to paint from a portfolio of images gleaned from cards and calendars. In the end, over what turned out to be her final three years, Margaret Lunt painted a small but riveting collection of 9 works, all oil on canvas.
Having begun with a lighthouse, she next painted a still life with delft pottery and fruit, then an image of two doves, and two more landscapes, followed by the Devil’s Cat. Her final two images, both winter scenes, feel like they were painted from cards rather than calendars. The first of these portrays gift-laden boats on a shore and her final piece, another lighthouse, more hallucinogenic than any of her previous works, appears as a kind of breakthrough.
While this small body of work represents the final blooming of a fertile imagination, it was not the first metamorphosing of self accomplished by this remarkable woman who stayed active and alive throughout the many demands of her 93 years.
Margaret died, at home, Tuesday, April 30, 2013.