Our family is celebrating a kind of anniversary this year.  Keeles have been living in the GTA for 185 years.*   In 1832 my great-great-grandparents, William Conway and Mary Cleaver Keele, emigrated from Southampton, bringing six children with them, only to discover that  they had been misinformed about William’s eligibility to practise law in Ontario;  although he was an experienced barrister, it transpired that he had to first fulfil several years of residency requirements before he could hang out his own shingle.   On the rebound, so to speak, he bought a half-share of a Kingston newspaper.  Unfortunately, he discovered that while he was a Tory, the other owner was a Whig, and that is why there is no Keele Street in Kingston.   

I imagine those first few years in Canada were a nightmare. Mary had been raised in India, where her father had worked for the East India Company.  What a shock those first Canadian winters must have been.  It doesn’t surprise me she didn’t survive her thirties.

However, she did live to see some financial stability.  Returning to Toronto, William again cast around for an source of income and, like many a Keele who followed, became a writer, in his case an author of  magistrates’ handbooks for Upper Canada.  I have one of his books.  It is  fat, leather-bound, and fine-printed.  I had never opened it and was astonished when a friend, who is an archivist, leafed through it and commented that the writing was outstanding.  I hadn’t realized that legal writers should be wordsmiths.

Apparently he was and the family settled in the Junction, where they remained.  Properties were big then.  The Keeles’ next-door neighbours were the Howards, who eventually donated their land to create High Park.  The Keele farm was bounded by what is now Runnymede, Annette, Keele, and Bloor.  In fact here was enough room to build a racetrack on the west side, where the first four Queen’s Plates were run.   The existence of this track suggests to me  at least one of the four sons harboured a passion for horse racing.  None of them followed their father into the law, apparently preferring to farm.  

After Mary’s death, William Conway remained in the Junction and was able to commute to downtown York by 1862 when the railroad was completed. He also remarried.  His and Mary's two daughters - Amelia and Elizabeth Anne (for whom I am named) - remained at home for their whole lives.  Elizabeth Anne donated a large embroidery of Queen Victoria to the Royal Ontario Museum; such a creation speaks of a quiet life.  The four sons, one of whom was my great-grandfather, were given small inheritances and sent west.  There they and their own sons encountered the bust that follows a boom, the General Strike of 1919, the Drought, and the Great Depression.

By now you are seeing a pattern:  timing is not a family forte.  What this means for you is that watching me is a good financial strategy.  Simply put, whatever I buy, you should divest yourself of.  And vice versa.  You’re welcome.

There remains, however, one particular delight  in living around here for this Keele.  I grew up in Winnipeg trying fruitlessly to spell my name over the phone or in person.

    Keele - K E E L E.
    Oh, Keely!
    No,  Keele - K E E L E.
    Got it - Kell.
    No,  Keele - K E E L E.
    Kelle?
    No,  Keele - K E E L E.
    Oh, sorry, Miss Kelly!
    
    ...close enough...


Around here,  all I have to do is say “Keele - like the subway stop.” 

​One small step for a Keele.  Timing isn’t everything.

I was reminded of the old golf joke — “Hit the ball, drag Harry” today on  our walk.  You wouldn’t think that a 22 pound terrier could successfully resist walking on a lead but he did, all four legs stiffly leaving tracks on the driveway.

Not that I really blame him.  It is France 1915 on our tiny street.  The house vibrates from 7 to 7 from the huge front-end loaders, the gravel trucks and the trenching machine which occupy our territory.   I suppose the watermains might be as old as that war and they frankly do need replacement but poor Theodore, a dog who is afraid of cardboard boxes, is rigid with terror.

So I wasn’t surprised when, in the studio later, he tried to scale my legs to get to the safety of my lap.  I’m into the final glazes of the two paintings which I have been posting and,  tempting as is the thought of sitting,  I’m a stand up painter.  Like most painters, I use my whole arm  frequently - sometimes to scrub, sometimes to lay down a line, sometimes to glaze.   We need to step back frequently too and I regularly fall off my stepstool  when I forget that.   


Scared or not, Theodore will have to settle for the floor at my feet where, no doubt, I will do another header or two.  Plus ca change….

True confession.  I wore orthopaedic shoes —brown Doc Martin’s, I guess —for what felt like forever.  Age seven to twelve, actually, at which point I refused to embarrass myself further.  My flat feet seemed to have been reshaped from duck prints to what my love calls "your Egyptian feet” — always ending with “I don’t know how they hold you up”).

But my feet are making duck prints again and my back stopped speaking to me at noon.  Yet again I am in deep water with no land in sight (although the duck feet might come in handy).  Turns out that “It seemed like a good idea at the time” is a dangerous way to choose subject matter.

Little girl in white dress.  What could possibly go wrong?

The fact that her skirt was tulle apparently registered enough for me to identify it in the last post.  I ADORE tulle.  If anybody ever gave me a ballet tutu I would probably never take it off.  Thousands of hints have failed to produce a tulle anything and thus I am reduced to painting it on others.

Loving it and painting it are different continents.  Today the charm of the tousled layers has come head to head with the sorting out of said layers. Cross-eyed trying to establish just how many tulle overskirts she is wearing and where they do and don’t overlap, I am driven by the grim truth  that, if I get it wrong, the painting won’t read right.    

So this means returning to first principles.  Yes, the glaze oil process as I practise it necessitates least five separate layers of paint.  And yes, that allows for corrected rendering at least four times.  But it has been my experience that getting the drawing right at the beginning makes the difference and that means paying close attention to detail and line at every stage.  Portraits are, of course, the most dependent on exact rendering.  (You will remember that my lapse of judgment chose to paint a portrait surrounded with tulle.)  I stood at the easel today for three hours and staggered through the drawing.

That propelled me into the grisaille, or value study, which establishes the tonal structure like a sepia-tone photograph.  Nothing slapdash here either.  I have learned the hard way that careless brushstrokes will return to haunt me.  So whether I am painting a leaf or a nose, I try to imagine the “grain” of the area and echo that with my brush.  Again, the damn tulle.  Four more hours for my arches to sink.

Our marriage has precious few secrets.  But I don’t remember anything in our vows which said I couldn’t keep a small dark chocolate stash for those late afternoon duck-print moments.

Jon and I attended a wonderful wedding reception this weekend;  everything about it was perfect, to the point that expecting anything more from the evening would have amounted to gilding the lily.

Yet one of those rare moments of grace occurred.  The band was taking a break and we had just sat down to drink some water and catch our breath, when children took possession of the dance floor.  I don’t think any of them, all dressed in their party finest, could have been over five.  One little girl promptly lay down and allowed herself to be dragged ceremoniously by one foot while affecting a tragic expression.  A  retro “Twist” started up a few feet away.

And then it happened.

A small vision in a long white tulle dress sauntered out and sank to the floor, gracefully laying her torso across the outspread skirt.  She seemed to be channelling a Tchaikovsky ballet and I am a fool for little girls in tulle so  I grabbed Jon’s phone and ran.  The dying swan agreed to reprise the pose and her mother graciously encouraged me to go ahead.

Later that evening, someone in a suit and tie  (who turned out to be her slightly older brother) accosted me outside the women’s washroom.  He opened by declaring his excitement over the new painting of his sister.  He wanted details about size, composition and completion date.  It was oddly flattering.  I tried to explain that one of my digitals has less than a one-in -a-thousand shot of becoming a full oil painting but he was all in and yet again resistance was futile.  Had he been fifty years older, he would have handed me a commission contract.  I did manage to convince him that I couldn’t think about starting it before November.  That apparently satisfied him and he strode away, probably returning to his pint-sized corporate responsibilities.

So the swan and her agent are in charge of this creative studio.  Looks like  I’m going to paint “Another Big Day.”