Rookie painter dispels pandemic gloom: ‘I have a real positive outlook on life’
Self-taught artist Maggie Smith of Waterford spreads joy, one canvas at a time
Since first picking up a paintbrush on a whim in March, Maggie Smith has produced 105 paintings and sold more than three dozen to impressed patrons of the Simcoe bakery that displays her work.
Not bad for someone who still can’t draw a straight line.
“If somebody asked me a year ago ‘Would you be able to paint some pictures and have people buy them?’, I would have laughed so hard,” Smith said.
“Because I can’t draw. So why would I ever think I could paint?”
Smith does it by layering acrylic paint on the canvas, using contrasting colours and textures to create the fine details she would never be able to sketch by hand.
It’s a technique she found on YouTube when casting about for a new hobby after COVID-19 closed the Simcoe cooking school she managed and taught at for the past 10 years.
“My whole life has been business. I never took anything art in school,” said Smith, who previously worked in government for 16 years and owned a Sears store at the Simcoe mall.
The pandemic left her with time on her hands and nowhere to go.
“Here I am at home, and I’m trying to figure out something to do,” she said. “I’ve never been a TV watcher.”
Painting, she said, “grabbed my interest like crazy.”
She devoured how-to videos and signed up for online classes in brushwork and colour mixing.
“Before I knew it, I had 43 paintings done over a twomonth period,” she said.
Smith’s self-taught artistic style is as bubbly as her personality. Whether she’s depicting animals and landscapes or dabbling in abstract impressionism, her work is full of cheer.
“I have a really positive outlook on life, and I love the colours,” she said.
Canvases started piling up in the basement of Smith’s Waterford home, so she and her husband Bill turned an upstairs bedroom into a studio.
With soft instrumental music playing, Smith will spend painstaking hours manipulating paint to create a horse’s mane, a bird’s ruffled feathers, or waves crashing on the shore.
“You have to be patient,” she said. “To sit and relax and paint is beautiful.”
As she paints, she thinks about her late mother, Irene Mawle, a prolific knitter, gardener and decorator.
“She did everything with colour and made things beautiful,” Smith said.
“I have a picture of my mom facing me. After I finish every picture, I turn to her and I say, ‘Mom, we did it. Thank you.’”
Smith became the de facto artist in residence at Viking Bakery in Simcoe after she casually remarked to owner Birgir Robertsson that the walls of his Norfolk Street shop were looking a little bare.
He promptly invited her to display her artwork.
“I was scared at first. I mean, there’s so many professional artists around this area. What would people think of my work?” Smith said.
“But as people came in and saw the pictures, I had so much positive reaction. Here I was creating something from my heart and it was reaching their heart, which was totally amazing to me.”
The bakery is now chock full of Smith originals, and she gave her fledging studio a name — Canvas Creations.
Robertsson said the paintings are a hit with his regulars, who before the lockdown would enjoy them while sipping coffee and nibbling on Icelandic baked goods.
“The people really like the pictures. It’s very good decorating for the bakery,” Robertsson said.
“They are great. The more she paints, she’s getting better and better.”
Robertsson lets Smith know each time a painting is sold so she can be there to take a photograph of buyers taking home one of her “babies.”
“COVID has been such a hard, cold thing on our society. People can’t even hug anymore,” Smith said.
“My goal right from the very beginning was to create something that made others happy and brought smiles to their houses.”