ODE TO MONTREAL
Artist shares love for and from city in vibrant exhibit
The view from the top of Montreal’s Place Ville Marie is breathtaking, whether you’re seeing it for the first time or the 101st. Beaver Lake on Mount Royal is a wonder during any season — verdant and lush in spring and summer, brilliant with autumn foliage reflected in the water, serene and white in winter. Walk through Westmount and note the red brick on so many houses, warm and rich.
These images are among the many vibrant and colourful paintings in Love Montreal, the latest solo exhibition by painter and printmaker Lynda Schneider Granatstein. It opens Thursday at Galérie Cazeault.
When asked if the show is a love letter to the place she has called home all her life, Schneider Granatstein thought for a minute before responding: “It is really a love letter from Montreal to me, from my own little Montreal.”
Schneider Granatstein has been a professional artist for more than 40 years. She has had more than 20 solo exhibitions in Canada and internationally and been in more than 100 juried and group shows. She has always painted what has meaning to her, such as people and interiors she held close and dear, and still-life images incorporating such objects as her grandmother’s teacups or the dancers from Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal.
Then in the autumn of 2011, she was an artist-in-residence at the Leighton Artists’ Colony at the Banff Centre for two months.
She said that had a profound effect on her. “I started to look around and see the landscape there. ‘This is so intriguing and interesting,’ I said. I went on hikes by myself and started to do paintings of landscapes.”
Back in Montreal, she found herself wanting to paint landscapes and make them more relevant to her. “As I walked around where I live, I started to think, this is the most beautiful city in the world. I have travelled everywhere, but to me nothing is as beautiful as Montreal,” she said. “I started to draw and paint Beaver Lake, with its autumn puddles and reflections of autumn trees. I started to do streets around my house.”
Schneider Granatstein lives in Westmount, “on the flat,” as locals say — not far from Sherbrooke St.
One of her paintings depicts the view from the top of her house. She climbed up to the roof when an airconditioner technician was there working, to see what he could see.
“I always maintained, especially when I was teaching, that it is important to make paintings of what you know,” she said.
She found herself revelling in her garden and “loving the way the sun greets you” on her street; heading east toward downtown and painting scenes on Sherbrooke St., walking to Old Montreal and marvelling at everything from the old brick on the buildings to views of the St. Lawrence.
“It was an evolution of scenes that resonate with me because of my attachment to them within the narrative of my life,” she said.
“I had had a studio in Old Montreal for almost 20 years — and did something I had always wanted to
do, and went onto La Grande Roue: oh, the view.”
She had dinner at the top of Place Ville Marie, at Les Enfants Terribles, with a group of friends who celebrate their birthdays together.
“And I looked out and said, ‘Look what I can see up here.’ ”
En route to Arthurs on Notre Dame St. in St-Henri with one of her children one day, she spied a fountain. It found its way into one of the paintings in Love Montreal.
Schneider Granatstein photographs places she sees — “I wait until the light is just right” — and makes sketches on paper, then draws on canvas, and adds collage to give texture and depth to the work as it takes shape.
Others have painted cityscapes of Montreal before her, “but not walking in my shoes and seeing it through my eyes,” said Schneider Granatstein. “I believe I have always pursued the same theme: making paintings of something that is profound in my life.”