My Sister

This is my sister Lynne Deragon at the age of several months. She was born after WW II and thus was in the vanguard of the Baby Boomer generation. ( I, on the other hand, was refered to as a 'war baby', conjuring an image of tiny Maurice Sendak fighting troops.) I remember very clearly the day I first met her.

As you can see I was thrilled to have a little sister!

A few years ago Lynne and family visited us from Toronto on her significant birthday. We all watched as she opened her gifts on New Year's Eve. What was she looking at here?

She was looking down at this pouch which contained something I had spent the previous autumn creating from bits and pieces of stuff and memories.

This is what was in the pouch; an art journal celebrating her life. Details follow.

These first two sections represent the day of her birth, January 1st, symbolized by a champagne glass bubbling forth, followed by the blue bunting bag she wore home on the first day I ever saw her, riding along in the back of the taxi. I remember feeling quite disappointed that she wouldn't even open her eyes to look at me, no matter how hard I stared at her.

Ever the actress, even in school she sometimes assumed roles, arriving for class in costume, ready for recognition. She has told me of her Dutch Girl attempt, showing up in grade three wearing a Dutch cap, folding her hands on the desk and awaiting the teacher's approval. Apparently that teacher was not impressed.

However, a few years later she got her recognition and starred as Snow White. I remember sitting next to Dad in the school gym, watching her sing and dance while Dad stifled tears.

In her teens she sang folk songs in the Joan Baez tradition, playing at Montreal's Yellow Door and Toronto's Riverboat coffee houses. She had long black hair and played the autoharp.

Then she went to National Theatre School in Montreal and performed major roles in plays at Centaur Theatre and other venues. She has also done a lot of radio, t.v. and film work.( You can Google her name to find out more.)

These sections show Lynne in her longest-running roles: as daughter to Phyllis and Jack and as sister to me...

...as well as wife to Frank and mother to Melissa and Joanna.

These final sections show Lynne, the friend to all creatures, holding her Bichon Frisee, Lillie. She has also cared for horses, dogs, (Lillie is not really a dog), cats, bunnies, canaries and even fawns.

The birthday cake depicted to the right is my idealized version of our favourite cake, butter-brickle, which Mom used to make so well.

And here is how the cake really looked when I made it. Definitely homemade, not so photogenic, but delicious nevertheless. I know she enjoyed it. So did we all!

The Art Journals Come Home

After fourteen months of inspired effort, those of us who were able got together for the finale of our latest art journals, a few of which are pictured here.














Barb and Flip enjoy browsing the pages, as did the rest of us, eating, sipping and laughing.


















"Let them eat cake", says Ronna, who treated us to one of her masterpieces. And so we did. Delicious!














This is the cover for my art journal which has visited 13 other homes over the past year and a bit, mainly here in Eastern Ontario but venturing as far as Oregon , Nova Scotia and New York state. The theme for my journal is GLASS.


















Glass marbles in a Mason jar, painted 14 months ago to start off my theme, are now back home, just in time for marble season. Other peoples' contributions included a pencil study of a glass sculpture, collages of glass building facades, a bowl of flowers with focus on the stems in water, glasses as fashion items and coloured glass shards in the shape of flowers. All treasures!



















Glassblowers pontils or blobs make perfect subjects for glass studies; here nestled in tissue paper. These were not in my journal but I stuck them in anyway as they fit the theme.















This watercolour and India ink on Arches 300 lb. paper is part of a larger work which I call 'Moses Leading the Israelites'.

Art Journals

For the past few years I've been doing art journaling along with a growing number of other artists, some local, others from quite a distance away. We each choose a theme for our own journal, interpret it, then pass it along for the next person to add something. For our first journal we all chose a colour for a theme. My colour was aqua so I painted my 'aqua' eyes, ready to enjoy what others might do with that colour. The results were fabulous, sometimes funny and always inspired. When all the creating is done (one month per journal) we get together and hand over the books to each owner. And of course we celebrate with refreshments.
Soon we will be receiving our latest journals which have been circulating North America for the last fourteen months. I promise to share; meanwhile here are a few examples from previous journals.


















The artist who got us started doing these journals calls it a 'round-robin' of art. There were only eight of us contributing to this first set and her theme was:PATTERNS. And so I painted eight robins in a pattern going around,














It wasn't planned but somehow I worked birds into the same artist's second journal whose theme this time was FIBRES, so appropriate because she is a fibre artist.


















"MacArthur Park is melting in the dark, all that sweet green icing flowing down..." That song (by Jimmy Webb) inspired me to illustrate this journal's theme of JUST DESSERTS.












This artist used an old photo album with convenient oval cutouts, perfect for her theme: EGGS