Village Squire, 1977-11, Page 1441t
As short a time ago as last year Mona Mulhern's leanings were
strongly toward simple, naturalistic art.
find I'm just now starting to do what I did when I was a kid," she
says.
That has been a rediscovery of fantasy and she's become
fascinated by it. She feels she can relate more to her children
now than she could even a year ago. She recently took them to
see the movie Star Wars, a science fiction fantasythat so
impressed the children and herself that they went a sond time.
The imagination used in the show, the fantasy was exciting, she
says. It relates to what I'm into now," she says.
One of the things she's into is a lot of thinking about creativity.
Why, she wonders, is there this desire, this need for creative
things when it isn't part of the natural environment. After her
father died, she says, things were tough on the farm without
money to bring cultural things to the home. yet that drive to
draw, to be creative was still in her.
She wonders too where the images come from that drive
creative people. What leads a writer to think of words in a special
way or has a painter arrange lines and colours in a way that is
more than just technically good, but is also creative.
A large influence on her life and work is nature. When she was
a child, she says, her companion was nature. She'd go down by
the stream with just her dog, and nature was her friend. Today
she still loves nature. She likes walking and working in her
garden and when things get hectic, she walks the couple of
blocks from her house to Lake Huron where by descending a
stairway over the cliff she can enter a world that hardly seems to
be in town at all.
"Nature", she says, "makes you realize your insignificance as
a man or a human being." Man has tried to dominate the work,
always trying to "improve" things instead of leaving things
alone.
And so nature dominates all her work, though it's nature today
that is influenced by her fantasy. One drawing, for instance,
shows a tree with a face with a large dandelion beside it rearing
menacingly out of proportion to the tree. When asked to explain
it, she says that in nature she finds many of the small things the
most threatening. Dandelions, for instance keep coming back,
defying man. You cut them'down today and tomorrow they're
back again, reaching up with jagged leaves.
Of her work she says that "I'm finally getting any act
together." She is comfortable enough with her work now, she
says, that criticism doesn't hurt her. Art is a very personal thing,
she says and she's come to realize that if someone looks at her
drawing and doesn't like it, it's just their personal response to
her work, not a reflection on her.
No matter what the reaction to her work, she says, she has a
real need to create. There have been times, she remembers,
when she would get discouraged with drawing and just put it
dovyn for a while but always there is something drawing her back
to it.
That urge has also been leading her to more actively pursue
public viewing for her work. Besides the showing by the London
12,VILLAGE SQUIRE/NOVEMBER 1977.
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