Breaking the rules
Art helps Eileen Romaker rise above multiple sclerosis
“I don’t mind talking about MS,” Eileen Romaker says. “However, I don’t wish to be defined by a wheelchair.”
A diagnosis of multiple sclerosis in 1980 forced Romaker to give up her nursing career. She first focused on raising her family. But then she took a painting course with the late Gordon Perrier, a well-established local artist.
“I was hooked,” she tells me. That was 15 years ago. Since then, the Ancaster artist — “Today I feel 60ish,” she says — has been painting up a storm. A member of the Women’s Art Association of Hamilton, she exhibits regularly with them. Her illness takes second place to her artmaking.
Art, she says, “has allowed me an escape by focusing my energies on the positive things in my life.”
Her repertoire is varied and flexible. Her style is wonderfully succinct and barely lifelike.
“Imagination is key,” she says. “I can easily get excited by a colour and lose track of my composition, but breaking the rules of art keeps it original and fresh.”
Romaker’s painterly, soft-edged shapes seem to magically morph into landscapes, flowers or stories. For “Icarus’s Sister Swallows the Sun,” a watercolour, she began with a landscape and ended up with an ingenious narrative.
“It was really a series of happy accidents,” she says.
The title allows us to recall an ancient classical myth.
Icarus’s father fashioned pairs of wings for himself and his son, using feathers and wax. When Icarus flew too close to the sun, the wax melted, and he fell to earth and died.
Romaker adds a grieving sister who swallows the sun, a most appropriate turn of events.
“I made up a story that revenge would cause a sister to swallow the sun,” she says. “She is left alone in a cold, bleak land where the trees are mere sticks in the background. The alliteration of the title was purely serendipity.”
The sister sits on the left. Her paleness makes her leap out so we can’t miss her.
Her pose seems simple enough, but it offers an interesting shape. With her hands touching her knees, her body almost forms a circle and encloses a darker heart shape. As Icarus’s sister, her heart must have darkened with grief.
The landscape that Romaker began with “morphed into a figure when I couldn’t lift the stain of alizarin crimson off my paper. Hence the pink cheek.”
Romaker says she has worked with acrylic paint, but watercolour is best.
“I prefer watercolour because of its weightlessness, fluidity and challenge to control it just the right way to achieve an effortless look,” she says.
“Watercolour is underappreciated. It is a most difficult medium. You get no second chances and timing has to be precise.”
In “Escarpment Cascade,” Romaker captures the outdoors.
The painting was inspired by Tew’s Falls above Dundas. “I used a combination of photographs and memory to help capture the rush of water that was hypnotic and compelling.”
She lets the body of white and blue water take centre stage, surrounding it with a variety of shapes and colours. A horizontal band of bright orange, green and purple patches suggests foliage and shadows at the top of the composition.
“I love painting landscapes and try to capture the spiritual energy I sense,” she says. “The air and light inform this work, contrasting with the rocks.”
In “Hibiscus Joy,” Romaker paints the vase and flowers as barely there dabs and stains, letting the white of the paper play a major compositional role.
“It is mostly the colours and textures of flowers that inspire me,” she says. “The magical properties of watercolour describe the delicate petals. Allowing pigments to mix directly on the paper keeps it fresh and vibrant.”
Regina Haggo, art historian, public speaker, curator, YouTube video maker and former professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, teaches at the Dundas Valley School of Art. dhaggo@thespec.com Special to The Hamilton Spectator
“I prefer watercolour because of its weightlessness, fluidity and challenge to control it just the right way.” EILEEN ROMAKER
Artist