Shawna Lemay

Shawna Lemay’s engrossing collection of essays, Apples on a Windowsill, should be required reading for anyone with an interest in creating art and being human in challenging times. Throughout these twenty pieces, Lemay’s discussion ranges far and wide. Her subject repeatedly changes shape. But her argument always returns to the search for beauty in the everyday, the confluence of art and life. Or—to put it another way—the transformation of ordinary life into art. Without declaring it as such, Lemay describes her own life as one that is committed to art: making it, loving it, living with it. Her husband Rob is also an artist, a painter of no small repute, and, as we see, they support one another in their interests. Many of the essays here describe their joint ventures to galleries, in Rome and other cultural centres, where they might plant themselves in front of a painting and stay there for as long as it takes for them to reach some kind of understanding of how the work affects them. Lemay has done a lot of reading and talks lucidly about time-honoured techniques of making art—painting and photography—building an historical context for what she and Rob are doing. She wants us to understand her own artistic process, why she does what she does, why she’s passionate about it, why it matters. As a photographer her chief obsession is still life, and she goes into lengthy and fascinating detail regarding the everyday found objects that make their way into her photographs, describing rummaging through drawers and closets for neglected or forgotten items, visits to the florist, forays into supermarkets hunting for fruits and vegetables that she will bring home and arrange into a tableau worth preserving, textures and surfaces that make all the difference, the spray of sunlight that she rushes to capture because it will last for only a few precious seconds. Lemay often speaks in terms of transcendence: “In the place where poetry and still life meet there is a radiance.” But a good portion of the book is given over to the mundanities of life in the time of Covid-19. Something of an artistic manifesto, Apples on a Windowsill also functions as a journal or memoir, with Lemay recording her coping mechanisms for surviving a pandemic. And though beauty is clearly her passion, she does not shy away from the ugliness she sees in the world and forces that conspire to discourage the artistic enterprise, forces she’s continually striving to overcome, the chief one being self-doubt. From the first page, Shawna Lemay’s voice is candid and thoughtful, charmingly self-deprecating and alive with wonder at the splendour to be found right before our eyes, even in the most unpromising circumstances. The book entertains and informs, but most of all it inspires. Apples on a Windowsill is an intimate act of sharing for which we can and should be grateful.… (meer)

Shawna Lemay’s spellbinding novel Everything Affects Everyone begins with Xaviere preparing to attend her friend Daphne’s funeral. After Daphne’s sudden death, Xaviere learned that Daphne—a friend from college who remained curious throughout her brief life—has bequeathed to her a collection of cassette tapes. The tapes contain the recording of Daphne’s interview with a photographer whom Xaviere has never heard of: Irene Guernsey (also deceased). On the tapes, Irene—an artist living a reclusive life in an isolated house outside Edmonton surrounded by wilderness, who rarely exhibited her work and never gave interviews—opens up to Daphne about an unsettling, otherworldly experience. Xaviere, stunned and fascinated by a dialogue that veers in unexpected, bewildering directions, finds herself drawn to their conversation in a profound, life-altering manner as Irene describes her efforts to photograph angels’ wings. Further research into Irene Guernsey and her work compels Xaviere to move into Irene’s house, and as this portion of the novel winds down, Xaviere finds herself transformed by what she experiences. The book’s latter sections take place after the passage of 20 years. We meet Sophie Angela Duras, a scholar who also feels a connection to Irene’s work, which is still not well known but has emerged somewhat from complete obscurity. Sophie has devised a project that involves listening in on conversations among people viewing works of art. She stations herself in a room at the Art Gallery of Alberta where some of Irene’s photos are on display and writes down what she overhears. But everything changes when one of Irene’s angel photos is stolen—someone simply carries the photo in its frame out the front door. The brazen theft galvanizes public interest in the exhibit and in Irene, to the extent that Irene’s life and work come to the attention of a famous filmmaker. Further conversations between intelligent, creative women follow, driven by questions around Irene’s aesthetic methods and motivations. Suspense and tension in Lemay’s novel are not generated by the kind of event-driven narrative with which we are familiar. Rather, the impetus to keep turning pages is propelled by a relentless and sometimes playful flow of philosophical notions, theories and conjectures about what Irene was up to, and what the images themselves are telling us regarding unseen (perhaps unseeable and unknowable) aspects of our temporal existence. Everything Affects Everyone is an unexpected delight, a novel that defies many of the conventions of narrative fiction and leaves the brain humming with ideas about the nature of art, the mystery of creativity, the role of the artist in society and the need to stretch boundaries and continually challenge the status quo. Everything Affects Everyone inspires as well, by reminding us that, for many of us, art and life are intimately intertwined.… (meer)