2018 Supporting Artists
M'Liz Keefe
I arrived in Tilting, Fogo Island, in 2013, after being accepted to Tilting’s Artist in Residence program to paint in the Jennifer Keefe House. Within days of landing on the Island, I knew I did not want to leave. I decided I wanted to make my life and home on Fogo Island.
I now live in the small community of Barr’d Islands, on Fogo Island. My husband and I bought a small piece of land and built a home for us and studio for me. Our home sits on the rocky edge of Little Harbour, over-looking the North Atlantic Ocean.
I was born in New Jersey, and graduated from Cooper Union in NYC with a BFA in Painting and Drawing. Since the late
80’s I have travelled, lived and painted in numerous places throughout the States. I lived many years in Taos New Mexico, in the high desert of the Rocky Mountains, the mid-western plains of Nebraska, on the East River of Brooklyn, and finally in Boston, before landing on Fogo Island.
I have dedicated myself over the years to painting metaphor and symbolism through the vehicle of the landscape. My work reflects the beauty of remote environments, erosion, and the natural world. I work best in isolation, connecting to the intensity of seasons, light change, dark night skies, pristine and untouched natural surroundings. I work in oil paint, using wax, powdered pigments, wood stove ashes, powdered asphaltum among other materials.
Contact: keefefogo@gmail.com
Noel Mount
Digital imagery allows me the opportunity to develop the dra-ma I have captured in pixels. Digital tools facilitate being able to develop the moods that my bare eye captures before closing the shutter. Bringing the captured images into my post process-ing practice I can impose my imagination, working to expose the energy in the picture. Clouds can be enhanced, foregrounds exposed, lighting added; it is an art invented in the darkroom and practiced since the advent of photography.
I have spent years as a product photographer, however it is when I am walking and present to the natural world that I am most inspired. My medium is found in the possibil-ity within the landscape. I revisit a long hike when I take it off the camera and bring it into my studio. The depth of possibility comes to life. This is part of the beauty of practicing my art and the spirit in which I approach all of my photography.
Contact: noelmount@gmail.com
Paddy Barry
Paddy Barry is a Newfoundland-based photographer with a passion for storytelling, history and documenting. With a strong emphasis on Fogo Island, his photography aims to promote the beauty, inherent value and future success of rural communities in Newfoundland
and Labrador. Whether photographing ocean scenes, architecture,
places of historic significance or people, Paddy seeks to capture the subtle aspects and elements to tell a compelling visual story.
Paddy’s photos have been published in numerous magazines including National Geographic, The Globe
and Mail, CNN.com, La Presse and others.
Cathy Keefe
Cathy Keefe lives in Tilting, Fogo Island. Sheis an active member of the community, vice-president of the 50 + Club, and an active member of St. Patrick’s Parish. She is on the Board of Directors TRACS (Tilting Recreational and Cultural Society) and has been on the Artist’s Selection Committee of Tilting AIR (Tilting Artist in Residency) for the past nine years.Cathy Keefe has loved the art of photographyfor years, is self-taught, and spends her time observing birds, the ocean, foliage,and the beauty in the natural surroundings of Tilting and Fogo Island.Cathy is married to Frank Keefe and is the mother of four children Rob, Angie, Jennifer, Ryan. She is the Grandmother of Leo, Alex and Bran.
The Keefe Stage
“A fishing stage is a wooden vernacular building, typical of the rough traditional buildings associated with the cod fishery in Newfoundland, Canada. Stages are located at the water's edge or "landwash", and consist of an elevated platform on the shore with working tables and sheds at which fish are landed and processed for salting and drying. Traditionally, they are painted with a red ochre paint, though colours other than red are sometimes seen.”The Keefe Stage was built by Frank Keefe’s father Alan Keefe and his Grandfather James more than 70 years ago. Its original location was “out in the pond”meaning the men had to row out to the stage to gut and salttheir fish. The Keefe Stage was eventually moved to its present location in the late 1970’s. It is one the ofthe most photographed buildings in all of Newfoundland.
Ying Li
My goal in painting is to capture nature, in both its tough-ness and vulnerability, and transmit all of its energy to the canvas. To this end I use intense colors, earthy textures and calligraphic lines, working in the zone where abstraction and representation shade into each other. My interests and train-ing in Chinese painting and calligraphy lead me to a brush-work that is at once free and disciplined.
Color lies at the core of my painting process. I use it to convey mood and memory, and to express a particular sense of place and time. In my painting, color, line and plane interact, push-ing each other until they reach a harmony, a unity. Like a jazz musician, I hear the lines of saxophone, bass and drums, each improvising in response to the others, swinging the piece forward. If and when these responses reach their climax, the painting is done.
I discovered Tilting during an artist residency at Fogo Vil-lage on Fogo Island in 2008. One day my guide Tom Sargent toured me around the island, and the last stop was Town of Tilting. I fell in love with it at first sight. What a magic spot on the earth! When I first heard its name, I thought “Tilting”
referred to boats, but it totally made sense when I stood in front of it; layers of houses and fishing stables in every color you could imagine, teetering on gray rocks and the edge of deep blue ocean, swinging together with the tides, the birds, the clouds, and the broad ocean, making an organic and musi-cal harmony. I said to myself on the spot, “I will come here to paint!” Two years later I settled in Jennifer’s House at Tilting as a resident artist, and on the first day I started schlepping my easel and paint box around the village.
During my one month stay I found the villagers were even more magical than this remarkable place. Every day during my stay I was greeted heartily by people, even those I didn’t know. They stopped on the road to give me a lift to my paint-ing spot; fisherman on the dock handed me cod they’d just caught that morning; they indulged me with home baked goods and wild blueberries. One evening, at a gathering in the boathouse, villagers were singing Irish folk songs, citing poems, and telling stories. I listened while watching the ocean gently swung under a full moon, and felt at home and grateful. Hopefully the paintings I made during that stay show my feel-ings and gratitude to the village and people who created it.
Lisa Lebofsky
I paint the susceptibility of nature, and correlate it with human vulnerabilities. The paint marks are made with natural elements and on surfaces that remain visible through various layers of paint, permeating the entire image. The push and pull of lights and darks, opacity and transparency, abstract and real, enhances the variability of these transient scenes. By painting in this dichotomous manner, nature becomes a metaphor for our emotional struggles and encounters. My direct participation with the subject is vital to imbue a painting with the energy of a specific place, so viewers can con-nect viscerally: to move, excite and engage them.
In Ice Textures, I painted the multiyear ice that traveled thousands of miles to choke the shores of Fogo Island
with a glorious stillness while it melted to its eventual demise. This event is the culmination of ice released from the arctic in the warming months, but this spe-cific late in the year phenomenon, which had not been witnessed in over 40 years, was due to rising sea tem-peratures. The painting began with an abstract ground of blue and green oil paint melted by water spray. Each emerging layer is subsequently eviscerated with spray until the final image, which delicately sits atop glowing layers of paint.
Currently, I am in the midst of a multiyear mission to paint across North America to better know the changes happening in our environment and the people it is af-fecting. I have my MFA from New York Academy of Art
Kerri Schmidt
I am a Boston-based multimedia artist, educator and explorer. I seek to create points of entry in my art that engage and invite interaction and develop new ways of seeing and knowing. My sculptural pieces and installations are created from re-purposed materials and discovered treasures. My photographs mark points in time. I spent first half of my life in the vast landscapes of Northern Cali-fornia and the second half in the intimate settings of New England. These nature-based experiences and a profound pleasure for the small moments encountered during daily life are deeply rooted in my artwork and reflected in the conversations I create with the world.
Janice Thompson
Nature is essential for my well-being and for my creativ-ity. I take so many mental notes everyday, that combine to make my paintings an expression of the environment around me. Forrest, ocean, field, lakes and skies of all types create inspiration in all the seasons. Winter is a personal favourite of mine as the colours in the sky and frost and snow are just incredible.
My paintings come to life inspired by these special wonders of nature. A student of texture I especially love building colours and sculpting the paint and mediums to create not just a visual feel, but a textural feel as well. My paintings tend to evolve as the layers get added. I try and expose parts of the layers as I work so that you can see the development of the landscape over time.
Light and shadow in the sky, especially, winter sky brings so many opportunities for the development of shapes and tex-ture. I am more intrigued with monochromatic colour palates and choose those colours from the snow and sky. It lends itself well to the palate knives I use when combining paint, pastes and gels. And lets face it, its just so darn fun to play with paint!
Sketching landscapes in pencil and India ink, I can try out colour with water colours on these sketches and keep them for future larger textured paintings. They are playful and loose to capture the essence of the space without being too detailed and fussy.
Living and working in two wonderful parts of our country I am blessed with the most beautiful landscapes to draw inspiration from.
Claudia Brahms
I am a studio artist and textile designer. As well, I have been the co-owner of a textile manufacturing company grown from one handloom into a brand. Yet some of my most significant mentoring has come from the silence and wisdom of the natural world: the living textures on the forest floor, the flowing drape of a textile, piles of chalk pastels in a workshop, the glistening blue aura over an iced in harbor. Taking inspiration from the tactile experience of handling a
broad range of materials, I am guided by the use of all of my senses. Intuitively, I believe in the power of simplicity to illuminate the character and functionality of a constituent material.
Living on Fogo Island has exposed my mind to a raw experience of the natural world. There is a purity of un-derstanding that follows. This is the shining light of my current work and my scarves are the tactile expression.
Paddy Barry
Paddy Barry, a native Newfoundlander, arrived on Fogo Island from St. John’s in 2011-12 when he joined the Fogo Island Inn as in-house photographer and promoter. Outside his photography he is a professional printer, sometime singer-songwriter, videographer, filmmaker and organic gardener.
His love and dedication to the Island, as well as his love for all of Newfoundland is well known throughout the Province.
Among other creative adventures, Paddy Barry orga-nized the Fogo Island Fisheries and Co-Op 60th year anniversary celebrations in conjunction with the 150th anniversary of Canada.
His photographs are internationally well known and published in numerous publications including National Geographic.
Neal Greig
Neal Greig was the 2009 Artist in Residence at the Rear-don House, sitting in Sandy Cove down the way from the Jennifer Keefe Studio.
He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He studied Fine Art at Edinburgh College of Art and went on to a Post Graduate in Drawing and Painting. Neal has exhibited extensively through-out Ireland, also in London, Scotland, Chicago, and St. John’s Newfoundland. His paintings are widely sought after by private collectors, and his work is part of numerous public collections.
Neal has been awarded numerous grants, awards and residencies including: The Vermont Studio Centre Fellowship in Vermont USA, Invited Artist with Ontario Art Society Field Trip, Cill Rialaig Art Studios, and in 2011 Greig was the recipient of a grant from the prestigious Pollock Krasner Founda-tion in New York.
Last year Neal had the honour of being elected an associate of the Royal Ulster Academy.
Marry O'Keefe
Mary Margaret Hurley was born in Oliver’s Cove in 1935. She married Alan Keefe in Tilting in 1952. She reared ten children. For 23 years she worked as a book-keeper for the Town of Tilting.
Mary started hooking and designing her own mats 15 years ago. She has made over 40 mats in these years, giving many away to family and friends, and donating many to local organizations. She has sold only one mat in her life time.
Mary is Jennifer Keefe’s Grandmother. She has hooked this rug especially for the 2018 AAMC Art Auction. It is a picture of the Jennifer Keefe Artist Residence and Back Kitchen Studio.
Arts and Minds Canada is so proud and humbled to have been able to offer Mary’s hooked mat in this year’s auction.
Sally Van Natta
Sally Van Natta is a retired photography/art teacher from Illinois. She first came to Fogo Island In the late summer of 2013 as an Artist in Residence at the Jennifer Keefe House for a four week residency. She subsequently was awarded 2 more residencies by TRACS.
Sally has become a well-loved visitor to the Island tak-ing unique and luscious photographs of the remark-able landscape, specifically Tilting. Her photographs
microcosms of patches of the complicated and colorful terra firma, employing numerous photographs that are consolidated into one frame. The results are a wonderful intricate maze of plant life/lichen/and rock resulting in a small universe of the photographer’s eye.
She travels North America almost year round in a camper with her husband and two beloved dogs, The Bobo and Buddy.
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