County Fence magazine has wanted an art editor from day one. Well here I am, biznatches! That’s right, Walter Liu is here to be your guide into the art world of Eastern Ontario. But there’s a problem, actually a few. I am a member of the internet generation, born in Hong Kong, raised in Toronto, and the first time I was east of Ajax was when Greg suggested I think about moving here. I don’t understand your obsession with pastoral post-impressionalist landscapes. I’m a digital artist who likes cyberpunk and vaporwave. I want my art to have badass well-endowed bizniches kicking ass rather than antique farm equipment and pine trees. That’s just not my scene.
Speaking of the scene, I can’t find it. I know it exists. It has to – this place is catnip for starving artist types. Don’t get me wrong, I see the signs. A barn quilt here, a piece of driveway art there, and the odd gallery with hours I can’t seem to figure out. I know you’re here, but it feels like two ships passing in the night. When I asked Greg and Rachael, who grew up here, they just laughed at me and told me to go to Prince Edward County. Jules rattled off a bunch of very local sounding names I didn’t recognize as if they were household names. None of it helped.
Eastern Ontario should be an artist’s Mecca, why am I not finding it? Why are there not giant art installations on every corner? Why does every third house not have a giant mural on the side of it? I know ‘The County’ (they know there’s more than one, right?) is full of art galleries, but what artists can afford to live there? Where are the rest? There are a couple galleries near my house. One is run by a cranky old woman who thinks living artists haven’t gotten the memo. The other is pretty good and the owner is friendly but it’s mostly Dutch bikes leaning on birch trees or seagulls on grey backgrounds. If I put up a farm scene on my wall I want it to have a cyberpunk anime girl looking out at a pink pixel art sky and futuristic barn. I mean…we have the northern lights and how much more vaporwave can nature get? My question is this: if a large group of people can mostly agree on a mural on the side of a building in the city, why aren’t there more on any number of the privately owned barns that seem to be everywhere?
I know there is a local art scene. There are galleries, theatres, and active arts councils. I just can’t figure out the entry point and when I do it’s all quaint family-friendly arts and crafts. One thing I’ve already learned about country living is that it’s not about googling, it’s about who you know. But I don’t know anyone.
One person I do know is Brenda Hogg, Napanee Correspondent. Maybe Brenda’s not what you picture when you think art aficionado but famed record producer and all-around spiritual guy Rick Rubin says that being an artist is more a state of being than a job. He says artists are people compelled to live a certain way and that makes art inevitable. They may not know why they do it, they just do and interesting things fall out. Brenda Hogg is one of those people. Her obsession with ironic retro-eighties blue-collar style and found objects makes art inevitable.
Brenda’s home is like most of the others on the street – a small bungalow with white aluminum siding and green shutters. This is County Fence Bi-Annual so I’ll mention she’s rocking an early-2000’s Home Depot privacy fence to keep the pups in and looky-loos out that has greyed to a distinguished patina. It’s the home she grew up in and where she has been living for the last couple years since her parents passed. A time capsule of gold shag carpet and vintage faux-walnut paneling. She’s kept some of her parent’s mid-century furniture: a chrome and green-yellow formica kitchen table, a few folk-art lamps with tree-bark and leather shades, a pair of brass tubular frame easy chairs with brown floral print upholstery, and a knock-off Kit-Cat Klock. Brenda’s own collections are the star of the show, though.
She’s a self-described thrift-aholic and flea-market shopper for any found objects that are quintessentially eighties. She lives her art whether it be high-waist acid-wash jeans paired with a padded-shoulder animal-print jacket or her Tupperware dining set. Speaking of cups, she has a full display cabinet of McDonald’s promotional glassware and a bookshelf of VHS tapes three-deep, half of which are recorded off of television. It’s gold!
I sat in a vintage rattan egg chair while we listened to a Bryan Adams cassette play from a silver boombox as she took me through her process. Saturday morning she is up early and on the road hitting up all the yard sales because she wants to beat the pickers. After that she goes to her favourite flea market, which I am not to reveal upon penalty of death. She also constantly scans Facebook Marketplace and Kijiji. Always be ready to make a deal, and a little cleavage never hurts, she tells me. And I very much agree. Never take their first offer and try your best to seem ditzy and disinterested. Brenda Hogg only accepts half-price or lower.
When I asked Brenda about getting into the local art scene she told me it mostly happens at home. It’s who you know, after all. And she does know a few professional artists. One does tattoos and the other paints murals for a few different municipalities. The mural painter also works at The GT Boutique with Brenda. Mostly, she says, art happens at home as a hobby. Passion projects and traded favours. Who could afford otherwise? Spoken like a true artist.
After a couple of rum and diet-cokes I asked whether she had traded anything for an art piece over the years. She keeps an eye out for certain things on her weekly rounds and they’ve given her various pieces as thanks. There’s a vintage hand-saw with the Napanee rail bridge painted on it for her years of gathering rusty tools for a friend. She’s got more than a few whirligigs and other decorations in her back yard she’s traded for this or that. Her front entryway has a howling wolf carved from a tree-trunk by chainsaw that she traded some Blue Jays World Series commemorative mugs for. “But what about canvases?” I asked her. This made her a little sheepish which only made me more interested.
It took some pushing and the rest of her rum and coke for Brenda to lead me downstairs to her little-used rec-room. Cement floors, more faux-walnut panelling, and a drop ceiling. Classic rec-room stuff. On one end there was a green shag rug with a couple of couches and an old projection television. The other end had a pool table covered in laundry baskets full of knick-knacks. Hung on the wall behind it, though, was the sliding door from an old commercial van with the most epic of eighties van murals. A curvaceous woman riding a giant white wolf wearing nothing but a viking helmet and a python draped over her shoulders, brandishing a sword with lightening shooting to the sky over an imposing mountain scene, and two dragons slithering through the sky shooting realistic flames to frame the spectacle.
I was gob-smacked. It is the last thing I would ever have expected, but also exactly what I should have expected. It might to date be the best thing I have ever seen. I needed a moment to simply take it all in so I crouched and just stared for what might have been minutes. It was beautiful. And the woman…she was not some lithe waif or artist’s muse, she was full-figured and powerful. Thick thighs (these thicc thighs really could save lives!) and full breasts with a narrow waist and muscles bulging as she, and the wolf, stare the viewer down menacingly. I offered to buy it on the spot but Brenda, typically confident, bashfully declined. When I asked why — perhaps I needed to offer more? — she simply stood beside it and posed, a little sheepish. Artists only include, and often exaggerate, the most beautiful parts of a scene and Brenda Hogg may no longer be in a stage of life where she would pose for such a piece but I saw it. I saw young Brenda there on that wolf, almost life-sized hanging under a cloudy basement window on a faux-walnut wall, and I understood. God I understood. I can see it. And I am so here for it.
As the story goes Brenda’s first boyfriend out of high school, Dwaine, was a local and celebrated van mural artist but the relationship didn’t last. Dwaine got into trouble with some local bikers he was working with and had to flee the country. Brenda thinks he’s working some mining job in the outback, apparently he was really into Crocodile Dundee. The canvas was his invitation for her to join him but Brenda Hogg is a small town girl at heart and what might have been the best pairing of any two people I have ever met ended.
Dwaine, if you’re reading this please reach out. I’m a great fan of your work and have fresh walls to fill. But I wouldn’t suggest looking Brenda up. I might have to fight you for her.
-Walter
