Art To Taste, Hear, Smell, See and Touch

We often think of art as just something we can see but sometimes we can also experience it with our other senses.

Hearing

Animikiikaa by Scott Benesiinaabandan

During the exhibit, Insurgence-Resurgence at the Winnipeg Art Gallery visitors were invited to enter a dark room created by Anishinabe artist Scott Benesiinaabandan. When you stepped inside you heard this rhythmic sound like a heartbeat and then a woman started talking in a poetic and soothing voice in an Ojibway language. I liked to imagine the heartbeat belonged to a child in the womb and the woman talking was the child’s expectant mother soothing her unborn offspring.

Tasting

Here I am at the Art Institute in Chicago helping myself to some candy from an art installation by Cuban artist Felix Gonzales Torres. The work actually has a very sombre theme. Gonzales Torres made it as a tribute to his partner who died of AIDS. The weight of the candy when the installation first opens is 175 pounds the healthy weight of the artist’s partner Ross who died of AIDS. Gonzales Torres is a Catholic and just like mass participants are invited to eat the body of Christ here visitors can take candy to participate in the sweetness of Ross’s life but they also diminish the pile until bit by bit it disappears just as Ross did when he finally died.

Smelling

St. Cecilia by Giuseppe Puglia- 1630

Every other year the Winnipeg Art Gallery hosts an event called Art in Bloom. Floral artists are invited to create arrangements to compliment different works of art in the gallery. The whole gallery is full of beautiful flowers and you can also smell the blooms of course. There are unique scents for each painting depending on what kind of flowers have been chosen. Here sweet-smelling pink roses grace a painting of the patron saint of music Cecilia who has turned her head to speak to the cherub holding her music.

Touching

Ejjnda-Push by Tsema Igharas

Tsema Igharas is an Indigenous artist from the Tahltan First Nation.  Her work Ejjnda-Push is a stretched caribou hide on a wooden frame with an amplifying speaker behind it. The skin can be played like a large drum and that is exactly what art gallery visitors are invited to do- use their hands to create a beat on the skin of the drum. We had this piece on display at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in 2017 and our younger visitors especially enjoyed this tactile work.

Seeing

Of course, the way we usually enjoy art is through our sense of sight. Here I am with Vincent Van Gogh’s iconic Starry Night at the MOMA in New York. The MOMA was one of the first galleries that didn’t forbid photos, but in fact, encouraged patrons to take pictures with the masterpieces in their gallery and post them on the gallery’s website.

There are times when visual art can be experienced with one of the other senses as well. I am excited to look for more examples once we can visit art galleries again.

Other posts……….

Art in Bloom

Chicago- Day 3

Visit to the MOMA

Elisapee, Shelley and Oviloo

During the eight years, I worked at the Winnipeg Art Gallery I had the privilege of getting to know the work of so many talented and inspiring Indigenous female artists. Since this is Indigenous history month I thought I would showcase three of them each with a major work they created. I photographed all the artwork in this post at the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

• 

Elisapee Ishulutaq has used oil sticks to record the history of the community of Pangnirtung in her colourful mural Yesterday and Today.

For five days in 2014, Elisapee slid along the floor in her apron, seal skin boots and knitted sweater, with her wire-frame glasses perched on her nose, creating a vibrant scene of life in her home community of Pangnirtung, Nunavut. You can see what life was like in Pangnirtung, generations ago, as well as today.

Elisapee is a renowned artist, who was awarded the Order of Canada. She is known for her expressive, autobiographical images of daily life in Canada’s Arctic. She died in 2018.

• 

• 

Shelley Niro made these huge woodcuts on woven paper in 2001 for a series she calls Resting With Warriors.

Shelley Niro’s art is very much influenced by the bead, birchbark and carving work she saw being created around her while growing up on the Mohawk Nation near Brantford Ontario. With the Resting With Warriors series, she wanted to give young girls an alternate image of Indigenous women, one not usually seen in the mass media.

In 2017 Shelley won the Governor General’s Award for excellence in visual art.

Oviloo in Hospital by Oviloo Tunille 2002

Over more than a decade Oviloo Tunnillie, an artist from Cape Dorset created a series of serpentinite sculptures to illustrate her experience of being sent to a sanatorium in Manitoba for two years when she contracted tuberculosis at age 5.

Oviloo in Bed by Oviloo Tunille

She was taken away on a ship and separated from her family. Her treatment at the hospital included periods of bed rest during which she was tied to her bed and she was sexually abused by a doctor.

Nurse with Crying Child by Oviloo Tunille- 2001

When Oviloo was finally returned home she felt like she hardly knew her family anymore. She had forgotten much of the Inuktitut language, was used to eating different foods and had learned new cultural ways.

Oviloo with her granddaughter –photo by Jerry Riley

Although the experience of being taken to away to a TB hospital was not unique to Oviloo, she is the only Inuit artist to have referenced it directly in her art.

Oviloo is noted for defying convention and cataloguing the story of contemporary women in the North. She is one of only a few female Inuit carvers to gain international success. She died in 2014 of cancer.

Other Indigenous Female Artists.…….

Transferring the Real to the Unreal

And Mary You’ve Seen Hard Times

Four Grandmothers

Paris/Ojibwa

Paris/Ojibwa by Robert Houle – photographed at the Art Gallery of Ontario

During this time when the world has been dealing with a deadly virus, I have been reminded of an art installation I saw at the Art Gallery of Ontario in the summer of 2017 that illustrated the impact of a deadly virus on a group of Indigenous dancers.

Created in 2010 by the renowned Indigenous artist Robert Houle who is originally from Winnipeg, the work titled Paris/Ojibwa is a moving memorial to Ojibwa dancers who died while entertaining the French Court in 1845.

The story starts with American artist George Catlin who travelled extensively in the west painting hundreds of portraits of Indigenous people.  He decided to bring his ‘Indian Gallery’ to Europe and display it there. He thought he might attract more viewers for his exhibit if he brought along an Indigenous dance troupe organized by George Henry Maungwudaus an Ojibwa interpreter.

George Henry Maungwudaus the leader of the Indigenous dance troupe that went to Paris. His wife and three of his children were among those who died on the trip to Europe.

The troupe performed in London and at the royal court in Paris where King Louis Philipe presented the dancers with medals.  Unfortunately, six of the troupe caught smallpox in Europe. They died never to return to Canada

Robert Houle, Paris/Ojibwa (detail) image from an essay by Shirley Madill for the Art Canada Institute

Robert Houle has included the names of some of the dancers at the very top of the installation. He has shown the dancers as a Shaman, Warrior, Dancer and Healer respectively and they are seen looking out at the horizon of their home in Canada. Each horizon has a specific physical reference. They are views of the prairie from the Sandy Bay First Nations cemetery near Lake Manitoba. Artist Robert Houle is a member of the Sandy Bay First Nation.

Robert Houle, Paris/Ojibwa (detail) image from an essay by Shirley Madill for the Art Canada Institute

Underneath each portrait is an image of the smallpox virus that killed them.

Robert Houle has created the portraits on the walls of a reconstructed Parisian salon with a marble floor. There is a bowl of sage on a pedestal at the front of the salon and I could hear soft drum beats as I viewed the installation. 

According to an April CBC article Indigenous people make up 10% of Manitoba’s population but account for 70% of COVID-19 infections. It also states that American First Nations people are dying of COVID-19 at twice the rate of the white population.

Robert Houle’s artwork reminds us how the effects of colonization have impacted the health of Indigenous Canadians for nearly two centuries.

Other posts…….

Art That Makes You Feel Sick

Old Sun and Emily Carr

Locked Away

She Painted Battlefields And Helped Start An Art Gallery

Ypres Cathedral by Mary Riter Hamilton – photo from the Canadian archives

Why would a 50-year-old Canadian artist with a successful career and many lucrative portrait commissions go to Europe and spend six years creating paintings of abandoned World War I battlefields?

That is exactly what Mary Riter Hamilton did.

Mary Riter Hamilton’s first job was in a millinery shop- photo from the Canadian Encyclopedia

Mary was born in Ontario but moved to Clearwater Manitoba as a teenager and found herself an apprenticeship in a millinery shop. When the millinery owner moved to Port Arthur Ontario Mary went with her and it was there she met Charles Hamilton who owned a successful dry goods business. They married in 1889 but four years later Charles was dead and Mary, his heir was suddenly a wealthy woman.

Easter Morning by Mary Riter Hamilton- from the collection of the Winnipeg Art Gallery and photographed there

She moved to Winnipeg, opened an art studio and gave lessons teaching women how to paint china. Later she studied art in Europe where her work was displayed in the Paris Salon, quite a feat for a woman.

Mary Riter Hamilton working in Paris

In 1906 Mary returned from Europe briefly for a Winnipeg exhibition. Journalists used Mary’s work as an example of how the arts might enrich citizens’ lives and exhorted readers to consider opening a city art gallery.

The first Winnipeg Art Gallery opened in 1912 was in the Board of Trade Building – photo by L.B.Foote

Mary mounted another Winnipeg exhibit in 1912 and in press interviews insisted it was high time Winnipeg had an art gallery.  In December of 1912, the Winnipeg Art Gallery opened. Many think Mary deserves some of the credit for that happening.

Reflections by Mary Riter Hamilton

Mary moved to Victoria, British Columbia.  She did very well in the next eight years, teaching, exhibiting, making connections with influential people, and garnering lucrative financial remuneration for painting portraits. She was awarded impressive commissions. 

Mary painting in Europe

Then in 1919 at age 50, Mary decided to go back to Europe this time to paint abandoned World War I battlefields. She lived in deplorable conditions as she painted the scarred and decimated landscapes of Belgium and France which the armies had left behind. She had no official status or income which was only granted to male artists.

War Material by Mary Riter Hamilton

She lived in a tin hut and painted outside in all kinds of weather, surrounded by unexploded artillery shells and collapsing trenches. She even survived an attack by bounty hunters.  She grew gravely ill and often went hungry but she persevered. Mary would create some 350 artworks in Belgium and France during the next six years.

Mary at work painting battlefields July 1919. Photograph by Anthony d’Ypres. Flanders Fields Museum, Ypres

Mary returned to Canada in 1925 and faced many obstacles trying to get her war paintings exhibited. In 1926 she donated them all to the Canadian Archives. The last twenty- five years of Mary’s life were marked by lost friendships, time spent in and out of psychiatric hospitals and financial instability. She died in Vancouver in 1954.  

Mary Riter Hamilton

What drove Mary to leave her safe comfortable life and thriving career to do war paintings and endure the hardships of post-war battlegrounds?  I have read many different biographies of Mary and no one really seems to be able to say for sure. When asked, she said it was her duty and honour to commemorate the places where her brave countrymen had fought.

Canadian Stamp honouring Mary Riter Hamilton

Other posts……….

Oviloo Tunille

Imitating Emily

The Canadian Woman Who Painted the United Nations

10 Things About Kent Monkman’s The Scream

The painting The Scream has been all over social media since the recent discovery of a mass grave at a former residential school site in Kamloops. Unfortunately, the Canadian artist Kent Monkman is often not credited in these postings for his stirring and graphic portrayal of children being torn away from their families and taken to residential school.

As a tour guide, I had the privilege of introducing The Scream to hundreds of visitors who viewed the painting when it was on exhibit at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in 2019-2020. Although the images in the artwork speak volumes on their own, people were interested in learning more about the painting.

Did you know that………

Children at the Brandon Residential School

1. The artwork is dedicated to Kent Monkman’s grandmother Elizabeth Monkman who was a survivor of the Brandon Residential School in Manitoba. The first time she spoke about her experience at the school was on her deathbed.

Kent Monkman – Photo by Samuel Engelking- from the Kent Monkman Studio Facebook page

2. The artist who created The Scream Kent Monkman spent the early years of his childhood on the Shamattawa First Nation in northern Manitoba where his parents were Christian missionaries. His father Everet Monkman was a member of the Fisher River First Nation and his mother Rilla Unger was of Anglo-Irish descent. The family moved to Winnipeg when Kent was six. He lived in River Heights and he went to school there graduating from Kelvin High School. He took art classes at the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

Massacre of the Innocents by Peter Paul Rubens- 1611

3. One of Monkman’s inspirations for The Scream was an artwork from the 17th century by Peter Paul Rubens called Massacre of the Innocents. It depicts a Biblical story where King Herod slaughters all the baby boys in Bethlehem in an attempt to kill the infant Jesus.

Photo from the Smithsonian Institute Website – Girls sewing at the St. Bernard Residential School in Grouard Alberta between 1925 and 1935 – Monkman included artefacts from this residential school in his display of The Scream at the Winnipeg Art Gallery

4. In his notes about The Scream Monkman says the painting tells us in a visual way what was found in the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015. Monkman says that report enlightened many Canadians who didn’t know about the devastation wrought by residential schools. Thousands of children never returned home because they were dead or missing. Thousands were sexually and physically abused, some starved, most forced into free labour and some used in medical experiments. Children were required to sever their ties with their language and culture during their time in the schools. 

Edvard Munch The Scream 1893

5. The title of Monkman’s The Scream alludes to an iconic painting by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch.

This photograph of Kent Monkman at work on a painting was taken by Aaron Wynia and is from an essay written by Jami Powell and published on the Art Canada Institute website.

6. Monkman created The Scream by bringing actors into his studio in Toronto who dressed up in costumes and acted out the scenes we see in painting. Thousands of photographs were taken and then some were selected, edited and cropped and finally projected onto a canvas where their silhouettes were traced and then painstakingly filled in with layer after layer of colour. You can learn more about Monkman’s process here.

Detail from Kent Monkman’s painting The Scream

7. One art critic says the face of the woman at the heart of The Scream

Dorthea Lange’s Migrant Mother -1936

is reminiscent of the face of the woman in Dorthea Lange’s famous photograph Migrant Mother.

Do you see the children trying to run away in the top right hand corner of the painting?

8. There are hundreds of details in The Scream that careful study can reveal. Almost every time I took a group of gallery visitors to see the painting someone would find something new or come up with a new idea of why something had been included in the painting.

9. The actual painting The Scream is 7 feet by 11 feet. It was purchased by the Denver Art Museum in 2017.

The Scoop 2018 by Kent Monkman from the Kent Monkman Studio Facebook page

10. Kent Monkman has done a painting related to The Scream called The Scoop.   The Sixties Scoop is a name given to the practice in Canada from the 1950s to 1980s  of taking, or “scooping up”, Indigenous children from their families and communities for placement in foster or adoptive homes. 

It is understandable why Kent Monkman’s The Scream has become the signature image for illustrating the tragic truth uncovered at the residential school in Kamloops. I just wish people knew more about the artist and had more information about his moving and thought-provoking masterpiece.

Other posts……….

He’s From Winnipeg

Starvation by Kent Monkman

Incarceration by Kent Monkman

A Different Kind of Nativity Scene

Memorable Final Day

The Canadian Woman Who Painted The United Nations

Lester Pearson sitting as the representative for Canada at the United Nations

Before he became the prime minister of Canada Lester B. Pearson was the Canadian ambassador to the United States. He played an important role in the founding of the United Nations in 1945.

When the international organization met for only the second time in an old exhibition hall in Flushing Meadow New York in 1947, Pearson decided the momentous occasion should be recorded by an artist.

Artist Pegi Nicol Macleod at work– photo from the University of Toronto archives

He chose a Canadian artist who happened to be living in New York at the time, Pegi Nicol MacLeod. She did a number of paintings of the session.

At the UN by Pegi Nicol MacLeod- photo taken at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in 2018

Since Pearson commissioned the United Nations paintings you might think Pegi Nicol MacLeod would have painted him at the speaker’s podium, but the person at the podium in this artwork looks suspiciously like a woman.

Pierre Berton gives a detailed and colourful description of this meeting in a November 1947 article in Maclean’s magazine.

Photo from the November 15, 1947 issue of Maclean’s magazine. You can see the map and podium and side balconies just like in Pegi’s painting.

The photo in the magazine matches Pegi’s painting.  

In the sea of men, Pegi appears to have included three women- one on the podium and two in the bottom right corner of the painting.  According to Pierre Berton’s article, the wives of many of the delegates were in attendance and the ushers were women. The head of the Indian delegation was a woman Mrs Vijaya Lakasmi Pandit. Could she be one of the two women on the right or is she at the podium?

Pierre Berton also mentions the names of some female journalists at the meeting and if you look in the press box just underneath the podium some of the journalists could be women. I think it is interesting that in a meeting dominated by men Pegi chose to include quite a number of women in her painting.

This is another one of Pegi’s paintings of the United Nations meeting in 1947– from the Mayberry Fine Art website

Sadly in 1949 Pegi Nicol Macleod died of cancer. She left behind more than a thousand works of art including her paintings of one of the first meetings of the United Nations.

Untitled painting by Pegi Nicol Macleod – from Wikipedia

Pegi Nicol Macleod is also well known for her paintings of women who served in Canada’s armed forces.

Other posts……….

De Ja Vu at the United Nations

Between Dog and Wolf

Warli Art

Manitoba Artist Who Catalogues History One Face At A Time

Have you seen the beautiful books Portraits of the North or Portraits of the Far North by Gerald Kuehl?  Gerald has done these absolutely amazing pencil portraits of an older generation of Indigenous people. I began following his work through the posts of a former classmate who knows Gerald and it wasn’t long before I became intrigued with the way Gerald is cataloguing Canadian history one portrait at a time. 

Each sketch which took him between sixty to a hundred hours to create looks so real you will think it is a photograph.    

Opposite each portrait is a short story of the person’s life. You learn about their childhoods raised in the traditional lifestyle of the north, and then how that life was changed often by residential school experiences, a stay in a TB sanatorium or the development of hydro projects. Finally you learn of each person’s accomplishments and contributions and receive additional information about what life has brought their way.

There are well over a hundred  portraits and stories in each book so to really appreciate them I’d recommend you only read one or two at a time so you can think about the stories and study the pictures closely.  

Hugh Tulurialik from the Facebook page of Gerald Kuehl 

You can go on Gerald’s website to see more examples of the wonderful portraits from his books or to purchase them.  On his website I learned he is currently working on a new collection called Portraits of the Plains. 

 Pelagie Povaliraq Katsuak from the Facebook page of Gerald Kuehl

You can also follow Gerald on Facebook where he posts a new portrait each week. 

Gerald’s books provide an intimate look at the lives of a generation of Indigenous Canadians. It is impossible not to be moved as you study the lines in their faces and look deeply into their eyes. Here are people with a resilient spirit who have made important contributions to the history of Canada. Here are people who can inspire us. 

Other posts………..

Are You Sure They Aren’t Photographs?

Inuit Fashion Show

Hopi at the Heard -Pottery

When is an Inuksuk Not an Inuksuk?

This marvellous 1989 sculpture on the rooftop of the Winnipeg Art Gallery by Manasie Akpaliapik is called Inuksuk. But I learned after I had worked at the art gallery for a couple of years that it actually wasn’t an inuksuk at all. It was an inunnguaq. What’s the difference?

Inuksuks on Foxe Peninsula- Baffin Island- photo by Ansgar Walk

According to the Canadian Encyclopedia inuksuit (the plural for inuksuk) also sometimes called Inukshuks have been found at sites that date from as long ago as 2400 BC. They are formations of rocks used by people across the Arctic as markers for all kinds of purposes- navigational routes, good kayak landing spots, good hunting and fishing sites, locations of celebrations and caches of meat. These markers can be in many different formations. 

• 

  Pirujaqarvik – Where the meat cache is

• 

  North Star- Nikisuittuq- Points to the North Star

• 

  Things That Fell in Water- Nakkatait- Good place to fish

• 

  Quviasuktuq- I was joyful here

Images from I is for Inuksuk: An Arctic Celebration by Mary Wallace

Inunnguaq on the other hand are shaped like human beings and can venerate a person, mark a spot for people to meet, or have spiritual significance. 

Flag of Nunavut

So this symbol on the flag of the Canadian territory Nunavut is an inuksuk or inukshuk because although it looks somewhat like a human figure it does not have legs.

But in 2010 this symbol chosen for the Olympic Games in Vancouver was really an inunnguaq even though officials and the media regularly referred to it incorrectly as an inuksuk or inukshuk.

• 

• 

Piita Irniq

Piita Irniq, Inuit cultural activist, inuksuk builder, and former Nunavut commissioner, says it is important to distinguish between inuksuit and inunnguaqs because inunnguaqs have only been built in the last hundred years or so, largely by non-Inuit people, and are not authentic inuksuit.

Inuksuk- a lithograph by Gilbert Hay 1981- photographed at the Winnipeg Art Gallery

There are inunnguaqs mistakenly called inukshuks or inuksuit all over the world.  

A statue in Hiroshima Japan donated by a variety of Canadian groups as a landmark for peace.

This statue in Hiroshima Japan is called an inukshuk on the plaque at its base although it is clearly an inunnguaq.

A inunnguaq in the Canadian Embassy in Washington DC

So when is an inuksuk not a Inuksuk?

When it’s an inunnguaq !

Other posts………..

Build Your Own

The Amazing Race- Driedger Style

Whalebone Sculptures

A Different Kind of Table

Is that a picnic table behind me? It is but…….. it is also a work of art called Table of Contents.

Viewed from this angle the table could be a sculpture but one lying down instead of in an upright position as most sculpture are

Located in Winnipeg’s Vimy Ridge Park just off of Portage Avenue the long steel table pays tribute to the people of the surrounding Wolseley neighbourhood who are the primary users of the park.

The words Our Place or chez nous in French reflect the sense of community and belonging the artists were striving to convey as they designed Table of Contents.

There are words or quotes etched onto the table’s surface. They were submitted by folks who live nearby and are frequent users of the park. They were asked to comment on the importance of the park, its natural setting, or the history of the area.

These quotes talk about the natural elements of the park like the elm trees, mosquitoes, autumn leaves and the sky

There are many different languages used for the words on the table. This is indicative of the surrounding multi-cultural neighbourhood where Tagalog, Portuguese, French and English are spoken. Even Braille is represented. The words are etched on the table in a way that gives you something to read no matter which side of the table you are sitting on.

Messages promoting a positive community spirit are etched in various languages and in Braille

Designed by Eduardo Aquino, a University of Manitoba architecture professor who originally hails from Brazil and Karen Shanski who is a practising Winnipeg architect, the table/sculpture is located at a spot where many of the walking paths in Vimy Ridge Park converge. Aquino and Shanski refer to the words on the table they created as a ‘landscape of language.’ It was important to them that the people who used the table would recognize themselves in the words on its surface. They hoped the table would be a place for people to gather to talk with each other and listen to each other.

Architects Eduardo Aquino and Karen Shanski pose for a photo next to another project they designed on the Osborne Bridge. Photo by Boris Minkevich from the Winnipeg Free Press

I am in the park frequently these days on regular stroller rides with my granddaughter whose home is nearby and I have seen people eating, visiting, sleeping, reading, smoking, taking a break from cycling and playing chess at the table. From what I’ve observed the table is fulfilling the purpose it was designed for.

Neat poem on the far side… Trees sway, children play, Hurray! I wonder if it was written by a child? I also like the sentiments A Place of Happy Memories and Always Love Those Beside You

Other posts………

He Looks Kind

The Guess Who

Between Dog and Wolf

He Looks Kind

When I take my granddaughter for walks in her stroller we often make our way through Vimy Ridge Park near her home. There is a statue of a young man there that always attracts my attention. He is crouched down, his hand stretched out and he looks so concerned and kind.

Portrait of Andrew Mynarski by Paul Goronson

I found out the man is Andrew Mynarski the son of Polish immigrants to Canada. He grew up in Winnipeg and attended elementary school and high school here. Andrew joined the Canadian Airforce when he was 25. He had been working as a leather cutter since age 16 when his father died and he needed to help support his family- his mother and five siblings. He is described as a quiet man with a good sense of humour who enjoyed woodworking. He liked to design and build furniture.

Artist Charlie Johnston created the sculpture of Andrew Mynarski

On June 12 his airforce crew was setting out on their 13th mission over France when Andrew found a four leaf clover in the grass by their plane. He insisted on giving it to his good buddy Pat Brophy who was a rear gunner on his crew.

On the mission their plane was hit and the pilot ordered everyone to bail out. Andrew was just about to jump with his parachute when he noticed that his friend Pat was trapped in the back of the plane. Instantly he turned away from the plane door and crawled on his hands and knees through blazing hydraulic oil to help Pat. By the time he reached his friend his parachute and uniform were on fire.

Andrew grabbed an axe and tried to smash Pat free but it was hopeless. Pat kept telling him he should just jump and get out. Finally Andrew did. French villagers found Andrew but he was so badly burned from trying to save his friend Pat he died a few hours later.

Pat however survived. The explosion caused when the plane hit the ground blew Pat safely away from the wreckage and he was rescued. Later he told the story of how his friend Andrew had tried to save him and Andrew was awarded the Victoria Cross for his courage and kindness.

Andrew’s statue makes me think about what a horrible thing war is. That a caring brave young person like Andrew had to die is such a tragic loss. I think about the contributions a man of Andrew’s character could have made to his family and community had he lived. It makes me so sad.

When I push my granddaughter’s stroller by Andrew’s statue I always say a little prayer that she will never experience the tragedy and sorrow of a war.

Other posts……….

James Bond is From Winnipeg

Canada’s Women Soldiers

Wars Dread of Mothers