25 things about me [irene duma]

In case you wanted to know a little more about the long meandering road I took to becoming a painter, here are 25 things about me:

1. 1. I loved art as a kid. It was my thing.
       
   2. But I didn’t start painting until I was 53. I’m a late bloomer.
       
   3. I did take a summer course at Parson’s School of Design in NYC when I was 19. I signed up to do a Fashion Design course but was bumped into the Fashion Illustration class two weeks before I left.
       
      Best bad luck ever!
       
      We drew all day long from live models for 5 weeks. Total bliss.
       
      My teacher was the best teacher I have ever had in any subject.
       
      My drawing improved immeasurably and I became really good with a sable brush and ink.
      It was also the early 80s in New York City, and me and the other kids got into Club Xenon’s for free on Thursday nights. 
       
      Yup. BEST … TIME … EVER.
       
   4. A month later I was at the University of Toronto where I had one of the worst teachers I’ve ever had. The first thing he said to us in Fine Art Studio 101 was, “You can’t teach art.” He then went on to prove his point — he most definitely couldn’t.
       
   5. I didn’t take any more art studio classes at UofT.
       
   6. I did take Fine Art History though. Fine Art History is super fascinating. Not super practical, but super fascinating indeed.
       
   7. After I graduated from university, I visited the Ontario Art College to check out their program.
      There I was surprised to learn that my art prof had been correct!  When he said “You can’t teach art” what he meant was that teaching people how to draw and paint was not allowed any more.
       
      Art school’s had changed their curriculum — they were now putting the emphasis on “concepts”, not on drawing and painting techniques.
       
      This, by the way, has been corroborated by many artists who went to art school in the 80s and after. Many say they didn’t learn a thing about how to paint the whole time there. They did however, still have to pay full tuition. 
       
   8. I didn’t want to endure four more years of academia and poverty to learn how to tape a few pieces of tissue paper to a board and call it “Untitled” (ooh, so snotty Irene!), so after saving money for a few months I went traveling to Europe with hopes of staying for a year to learn French, another love of mine.
       
   9. I found an illegal au pair job in Brussels that barely paid $50 a week and signed up for free photography classes at the Community Centre. Yes, in Brussels the art classes were free — as were their museums. I approve.

      In photography class, my teacher talked a lot about how important objectives are in art and design.

      “Yes, yes,” I nodded wholeheartedly for a year. “Art is all about your objective, bien sûr!”

      Then I sighed dreamily. I had a crush on my teacher.

      On the last day of the course, my teacher gave us some parting bon mots and recommended that we all needed to get more objectives. We didn’t have enough. He recommended long objectives, short objectives, prime objectives and fast objectives ...
      
      Huh?
      
      Then he took his objectives out of a bag, and showed them to us. He did indeed have long ones, short ones, prime objectives and super fast objectives 

      Turns out “un objectif” in French is not the same thing as an objective in English. 

      In French, “un objectif” is “a camera lens.” 

      What my teacher had been saying the whole year was that photography is all in the lenses. It’s about knowing which lens to use when. It is your lens that determines the quality of your photos — and that shapes your perspective. Some lenses are better than others. And yes, there are shorter, longer, and faster lenses.

      A whole year!

   10. The photographer also said my photos of centuries old cobblestone streets glistening in the rain were “banal.”  Ouch.

       I thought they captured my objective of juxtaposing the well-worn beauty and the march of time perfectly.

       However, later, when my Belgian friends came to visit me in Toronto and couldn’t stop taking photos of squirrels exotique … from a distance … so they were just tiny black dots in the grass … I kinda understood what he was saying.

   11. A year-and-a-half later when I moved back to Toronto, still super broke, I could not justify another four years of college — especially if I wasn’t going to learn how to draw and paint.

       So I started chasing my other passion: performance and comedy. I spent a decade in the improv and sketch comedy scene, and ended up studying stage clown. Then, after an auspicious start, I got kicked out of clown school. True story. We’ll save that one for another time.

   12. So, back to New York City: I had always thought that I was going to somehow end up there, it being the epicenter of the art world after all — and me being art’s #1 superfan.

       But I didn’t.

        

       I ended up in Newfoundland, Canada.

   13. Same thing, right?

   14. Newfoundland is the most easterly province in Canada. It is a rugged, sparsely populated island of rock situated in the cold and windy North Atlantic Ocean. It takes 20 hours to get here from the mainland, including a 5-7 hour ferry ride from the mainland.

   15. Perfect.

   16. My move here was quite spontaneous. I had a short film in the 2005 St. John’s Women’s International Festival and was flown out for a week of film, fun, forums and bacon-wrapped scallops the size of my fists. (Budgets were higher back then.)

       It was a hoot. The artsy community was fun, funny, and crazy talented.

       “Move here,” they beckoned.

       “Hmmmm. Maybe,” I said.

       You see, I had been harboring a teenage dream of living in Ireland one day.

       My high school teacher had told us that the Irish loved their writers so much, that they didn’t make them pay income tax.

       “Those are my kind of people,” I thought. “I must go there and be with them.”

       I had a fantasy of me writing away by day, working at a small table and hammering out the next great Canadian novel. Occasionally I’d glance out the rain-strewn window to mull a thought, only to marvel at the sheep grazing in the fog. In the evening, I’d sit down by my peat fire to eat a pie and a pudding. Perhaps some brown bread with a cup of mead. Then after a good day’s work, I’d pop down to the local pub where everyone knew my name. I’d have a Guinness or two, partake in some stories and laughs, and then be whisked off to join the music circle where I was known for knocking out a killer beat on the spoons.

   17. It’s obvious that I had a very romantic notion of what it was like to live in Ireland.

   18. Back to NL. “Move here, move here,” beckoned the crowd whose postal code started with A1A. “Have another freshly-caught GIANT scallop.”

   19. Newfoundland would do just fine.

   20. I moved here in 2008.

   21. I wrote for a bit: films first, then radio and advertising copy at an agency. But my love of art and desire to paint could not be quelled. In late 2016, I got laid off from work, saw an open window, and jumped through it head first.

       Best decision ever.

       I love love love painting. 

   22. So now I live in St. John’s, the capital, right downtown in one of those colourful row houses.

       They say this city’s downtown has the highest concentration of artists in all of Canada, and I can’t deny that it makes me giddy with glee that one of them is me. Whee!

   23. Newfoundland has its own time zone. We are 1.5 hours ahead of Eastern standard time. We are the first on the continent to see the morning sun, and the first to celebrate the new year.

       Newfoundland also has its own pony and a 2 giant web-footed dog, both known for their gentleness and intelligence, but only the latter for its slobber. It’s also where the world’s most popular dog comes from – the Labrador.

       We have no snakes! Also no raccoons or skunks. I can put my garbage outside and it won’t be destroyed. (Which oddly brings a nice sense of relief every garbage night).

       We have no natural gas. It’s just oil and electricity for house heating.

       But we do have miles and miles of coastlines with spectacular ocean views and hiking trails. And in the spring you can see icebergs flowing down the coast, and in the summer humpback whales breaching off the shore.

       And just in case you haven’t realized it yet, this is the island that the smash Broadway musical hit Come From Away is based on. It’s the heartwarming and true story of when 38 planes were ordered to land unexpectedly in the small town of Gander because of 9/11.

   24. I love it here. Island culture is built on community and I feel right at home — though I do admit that the sound of a fog horn bellowing through my living room still shocks me every time I hear it. Yup, every time.
       

   25. I can see the ocean from my house. Well, I can see a sliver of it — from one bedroom — if I stand on my toes and look between the downtown houses and buildings — after the leaves have fallen off the trees.

       But — I can see the ocean from my house!

   26. I live a few minutes walk to a magnificent hiking trail in a national park that hugs a cliff jutting out to sea.

       That’s a few minutes walk. Just in case you didn’t catch that.

   27. I also walk to work. It takes two minutes. I work part-time at an art gallery so that I can learn everything about the art business. It has a beautiful view of the harbour from its front window.

       On my walk to work I think, “I can’t believe I am actually WALKING to work, to my little job at a charming little art gallery which has my paintings in it, and an ocean view, in a quaint historic city by the sea.”

       I think this every time I walk to work.

   28. Then I think, “This would make a great plot for a movie starring Diane Lane. The Call of the Puffins: the story of a stressed out divorcée who moves to the edge of the world to follow her dream of becoming an artist.

       I also think this every time I walk to work.

       And that’s … wha… 28! I said 25. And I even missed a few things, like how I was a web designer, and an actor. And how I learned to explain complex principles clearly while working at the Ontario Science Centre. And how cute my kitten is… and, and,  and…

       But these stories will have to wait for another time, right?

       Because now it’s time to get back to painting!