Cuthbertson exhibit to focus on trip to Greece

Back with renewed vigour and a new vision after a trip to the Mediterranean this past spring, local artist Connie Cuthbertson will be the focus of an upcoming exhibit, “‘The Awakening’—Memories of Greece,” which opens Wednesday, Nov. 26 at the Fort Frances Museum.
“‘The Awakening’ is a collection of paintings I have done since returning from a painting excursion to Greece in April,” Cuthbertson said in an interview yesterday. “It is also the title of what I had written after my first day on Santorini.

“It expresses how I woke up to the idea of living in the moment.”
Cuthbertson went to Greece with a group of 27 artists for two weeks to study the country and its architecture.
“When I got there, I actually arrived ahead of the group and I went to Santorini on my own, and then met up with them in Athens,” she noted. “But when I was in Santorini, which is an island off the coast and also a part of Greece, I was going to try and relax a couple of days before getting into painting.
“The first day there, I hiked around Ia and took about a thousand photographs and hiked for a solid eight or nine hours, I just walked and walked and walked,” she recalled. “And it was absolutely like I had finally got my feet on the ground. It was like I woke up.
“For me, for painting, it’s like I am just starting now,” Cuthbertson explained. “Even though it’s my 25th year, it feels like, ‘Okay, now I am starting to paint.
“It’s like I woke up—I don’t know how to say it,” she enthused. “I’ve talked to other people, and you know if you get really inspired by something, it’s almost like you can’t believe you had it inside your head this whole time and yet there it is now.”
Cuthbertson said that first day she wrote a piece called “The Awakening,” that made her stop and think about accepting “where you are in life” and “taking the day as it comes.”
“It’s such a simple thing, really, but people can tell you that a million times and until it hits you in the back of the head, you just don’t get it.”
Given this is the 25th year since she started painting, Cuthbertson wanted to celebrate the milestone with a show of her newest artwork.
“Many of the paintings were done with acrylic on canvas, a newer form of painting for me,” noted Cuthbertson, who has tended to work predominantly in watercolours.
“I think the main thing for me was, because the colours are so intense, even the crumbling stone walls of Knossis, and everything is so rich in tone . . . I like the texture you can get with acrylic.
“It’s been a lot of fun exploring that, as well.
“I didn’t realize how much I already knew about acrylic, even just because of my experience with watercolour,” she added. “It’s very adaptable medium. I feel like I am already knowing some stuff. It’s very exciting.”
Cuthbertson said she’s aiming to have 25 pieces ready for the exhibit, and already has completed 23 since returning home in April.
Besides the acrylic pieces, there also will be watercolours on paper and pen-and-ink drawings, along with at least some of the numerous sketches Cuthbertson did while in Greece.
“I’ve always hated to sketch but I’m just hooked on it,” she admitted. “Every time I was in a restaurant or we were on the bus going from one town to the next, because we stayed in different villages along the northern shore of Crete, I had my sketchbook going to the whole time, just working from memory or photographs of different doorways I had taken.”
Cuthbertson said she didn’t realize it until the trip was nearly over, but everything she had sketched was a door of some description—and she feels it indicated a theme about entering a new stage in her life and making more time for her art.
“You know when you get an idea sometimes, and you think, ‘Oh, that’s a cool idea.’ And it’s kind of like a little nudge in the back of your head—people call it the muses talking to you if you’re a writer—it was like a 2x4 hit me in the back of the head.
“It was like, ‘What in the heck am I doing? I need to be painting,’” she stressed.
“It’s exciting as heck,” added Cuthbertson. “I think it’s so much fun, and I am really looking forward to people coming and taking a look at the paintings and getting a reaction, even if they’ve never been to Greece, or even if they’ve have.
“I’ll have to ask them where to go next because I definitely want to go back. It’s such an amazingly beautiful and simple country all at the same time.
“It’s really quite pretty.”
There will be an opening reception on Nov. 26 from 7–9 p.m., with the show running until Jan. 30.