Passing through Dildo and toponyms to remember

Lemieux's Solitude, oil on masonite, 14" x 13", Steven Rhude

Jean Paul Lemieux's painting "The Nun" was born into existence in nineteen sixty seven. It was the phenomenon of the summer of love, primarily in San Fransisco, but celebrated also throughout parts the rest of the US and Canada. A counter culture then held the belief that "A new concept of celebrations beneath the human underground must emerge, become conscious, and be shared, so a revolution can be formed with a renaissance of compassion, awareness, and love, and the revelation of unity for all mankind.^"[1]

  Throughout the twentieth century, Jean Paul Lemieux lived with the power of the Catholic clergy's long and sustained role in Quebec politics, culture and the domestic environment. Inspired by the Italian primitives, Lemieux found a way to both capture the moral rigidity and loneliness, (yet with an undercurrent of humour) of those called to a religious order and monastic life. It paved the way for the solitude inherent in his mature work.

For a long time Lemieux had painted sur le motif: directly and immediately from nature, often outdoors, but from the end of the 1950s on he worked in his studio, without models, using only daylight for illumination. “I am painting … an interior world. I have stored up a lot of things.”⁵  His free approach was in many ways similar to the practice of abstract painters: “You are guided by the picture much more often than you guide it. And that can lead to results completely unlike what you may have intended or planned.”^{6 -  https://www.aci-iac.ca/jean-paul-lemieux/technique-and-style#Primitivism}

[1] San Francisco Oracle, Vol.1, Issue 5, p.2

^{Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS}