Village Squire, 1976-01, Page 16Ron Walker puts finishing touches to one of his drawings at his
drawing board in his Huron county farmhouse.
Toronto artists
find happiness
in Huron county
The snow is piling ever higher outside their
East Wawanosh township farm house near
Blyth but sitting snuggly in their kitchen Bev
Katzin is saying _that she and husband Ron
Walker don't think they'll ever go back to the
city.
The husband and wife team of artists
moved into the old farmhouse at the junction
of two little streams last summer on a
one-year experimental basis. The experiment
is likely to become a fixture; Bev says though
the moment of truth may not have arrived yet
with the ever -tightening grip of winter.
The couple has found so much to fall in love
within the rolling farmland of Huron county
that they find it hard to visualize going back
to the city. "If I moved back to the city I'd
have to move to someplace with a" lot of
space," she says. Going back to her old
studio in Toronto in a 15 -foot wide row house
makes her veel very cramped, she says, after
being used to a spaciousness of the Huron
landscape and the rambling brick farmhouse.
The couple bought the house and small
acreage four years ago as a weekend retreat
but decided on the year-long experiment last
summer. They moved in and spent most of
their time putting the old house, which had
been abandoned for years, back into shape.
There were conveniences like indoor
plumbing and a furnace to be installed and
they have scraped down every piece of
wood -work in the building to the bare wood
for refinishing.
It's kept them so busy that they've found
little time for their art until recently. But
they've found powerful changes developing
in their work, they say, as they settle in to the
rural environment. Both are natives of a
prairie environment, Ron from Saskatoon and
Bev from Calgary and they find they have
feeling for landscapes. The prairie landscape
gives an artist a feeling of great potential Ron
says. "Both of us have a sensitivity to
landscape."
Yet each has a different style than the
other. The differences in style are particularly
noticeable in one work done by each of them
of the same scene, a scene in Spain that they
sketched while on a tour some time ago
through Europe. Ron's lino -cut print version
of the scene is realistic to the average viewer,
stressing old oil drums in the foreground of a
scene that festures a railway track and a long,
slopping mountain crowned by a medieval
castle. Bev's work, however, though still a
landscape is startling different. Her eye
reduces the scene to the rhythm of the lines of
the landscape, to a pattern of flowing lines
and colours. Both are effective, though totally
different.
Most of the work that Ron has done in the
VILLAGE SQUIRE/JANUARY 1976, 15