Artist hoping attitudes around aging will change
WHO: Lynda Lou Macintyre
FROM: Sydney, N.S.
AGE: 74
TYPE OF ARTIST: Macintyre is best known for her watercolours, jewelry, and silk paintings.
BET YOU DIDN’T KNOW: Macintyre is one of the few Maritimers to practise the Japanese art of Gyotaku. It involves taking a dead, not gutted whole fish and covering its body with ink, then printing it onto Japanese rice paper.
BIO: “I was brought up under the steel plant smoke in the north end. My father was a steelworker, and I come from a large collection of brothers and sisters, many of whom are very artistic and eclectic.
When I was a teenager, I couldn't wait to get out of Sydney, and I went far away to the Boston states. When
I was there, I had already shown an interest in art and had taken classes when I was in high school at Holy Angels. In Boston, I studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School in between my jobs and I was able to do that for the four years I was there.
When I left Boston, I did so to come to Halifax and go to the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University, where I had what I considered an excellent education. It really focused on problemsolving and expert artisanship. You didn't have to know how to do everything but you knew what was good. You were taught to look at a piece of pottery to see whether the craftsmanship was in it or not.
I had excellent instructors and I was very pleased to get the education that I got. It gave me a broad range so later, when I went on to teach art in the school system, I could do all these crafty things that went with that job but I could also teach painting and other more highly skilled arts.
When I finished at NSCAD, I came to my first job which was in northern Cape Breton and I taught north of Smokey for 13 years in five elementary schools, where the students were wonderful and it was an excellent job. And then, as times changed, I took a posting in Sydney Mines, which was also a wonderful place to work and the schools were very good. So I stayed in Sydney Mines until I retired and I moved to Sydney at that same time. So I was back where I started as a teenager, but only this time, I wanted to be here.”
Macintyre currently teaches jewelry-making at the Centre for Craft and Design and remains a working artist. WHAT SHE THINKS: “I've never really felt it was more difficult being a female because I am an outgoing person that usually gets what I want. And that may make me sound selfish but I wasn't one that ever would be stopped from doing the things that I wanted to do. And if anything was going on in the background that was influencing me in a negative way, I also may not have noticed. Because I tend to be positive and think I just see the best that is going on.
“I think my biggest challenges now are coping with the attitude towards aging in our society more so than the sexism. I can really see now that I am in this age group I can see that older people are marginalized. And I don't like that. I don't like it and I see it in all kinds of little ways that, even if you called somebody on it, they wouldn't even realize that they had done it because it is part of the society. We are not like the Chinese and the Japanese — we don't honour our elders. That's the biggest challenge I find.”