GUELPH LIFE


Connecting with Deeper Forces:
Artist Inspired by Rock Formations, History, and Spiritual Journeys

By Rob O’Flanagan


A painter’s studio is planted with visual inspirers — highly personal objects or images that strike a deep chord in the mind and heart of the artist.

Relics of childhood, one-of-a-kind found objects, evocative photographs or peculiar collections are intuitively and deliberately placed about the work space to help ignite the imagination.

Margaret Peter’s visual cues are ancient things and tiny things — images of insects entombed in amber and primitive drawings scratched in granite. Much of her recent work springs from investigations into things embedded or etched in hard rock.
But there are softer, more otherworldly elements that fire the Guelph artist’s creative process — ephemeral presences that she believes sometimes guide her hand and make guest appearances in her art.

Exploring a fertile zone between the material and the spiritual, Peter has made a career out of producing prints and paintings that attempt to bridge the two.

Both her in-home studio in Guelph, where she has print-making facilities, and her much more public Williams Mill painting digs in the quaint hamlet of Glen Williams hold clues to the internal sensibilities that fuel her art.

The history locked within fossils, rock formations and petroglyphs, she said, has long fascinated her, and much of her recent art shares her personal, long-standing attraction to such things. Her prints depict these phenomena in tones and textures that, in themselves, have a look of antiquity.

‘‘I’ve always loved history, ever since high school,’’ said Peter, 64, a retired teacher, a grandmother and an extremely busy human being.

Highly disciplined as an artist, Peter dedicates each Friday, Saturday and Sunday to her Glen Williams painting studio, located a short drive east of Guelph off Highway 7. About 30 visual artists working in all media share space in the three historic buildings that make up the Williams Mill Visual Arts Centre in this picturesque community that seems isolated, tucked away from the urban rush of southwestern Ontario, but which is just 45 minutes from Toronto.

The rest of Peter’s week reflects her broad range of interests. Mondays are for her granddaughter, and on Thursdays she volunteers at the Guelph Humane Society. In between, she fits in bridge lessons, a bit of golf and a host of spiritual pursuits.
‘‘At one point in high school, I really wanted to be an archeologist,’’ said Peter, who was raised in a small Ontario community where there was no art instruction in the high school. Home economics and language studies were the closest subjects to art.

‘‘I thought it would have just been a wonderful thing to travel around the world exploring ancient things,’’ said the artist.

As a teacher of gifted students in elementary school, the study of ancient civilization and the geological history of the Earth were among her favourite subjects to teach.

‘‘It’s all about the history recorded in the Earth. It’s there and you just have to open your mind to it,’’ she said, her tone growing excited. ‘‘Look at amber and the stories that are captured in it. These insects within it are millions of years old, and it is fascina- ting to think what the world was like then. It makes you think about our time. With global warming and all that is happening, what history will we leave behind?’’

Among Peter’s most evocative works are her small-scale prints depicting interpretations of these relics of the distant past.

Images of petroglyphs, dinosaur bones and insects are etched into fine paper subtly coloured in earthy tones.

And while her output includes tried-and true (and more saleable) subjects of the landscape, florals and her beloved cats, it is the images of her prints that remain imprinted in the memory long after leaving her studio.

‘‘It’s a great thing to be an artist, to be able to express what you have inside you,’’ she said. ‘‘I’m a happy person when I go into my studio. You can get a lot of emotions out.”
Peter has tried her hand at a number of approaches to visual art, getting her fingers dirty with many different media.

‘‘That is how I keep excited about art,’’ she explained. ‘‘If I did nothing but the landscape for the next 20 years, I would probably get pretty tired. You would eventually just repeat yourself. You’ve got to change it up and move it along.’’

While an art education wasn’t available to her in school, Peter always had an artistic calling. Early in her teaching career, she started taking university art classes, first at McMaster University and then at the University of Guelph, where she earned a bachelor of fine arts in 1974.

‘‘Being a little older, I dug my heels in and said, ‘I love this, this is what I want to do,’ ’’ she said. Continuing to work as a teacher, she completed an art degree, gave up teaching for about a decade and dedicated herself to painting and print-making. She returned to part-time teaching in 1988 and also taught print-making at Wilfrid Laurier University for a number of years.

‘‘Teaching has always helped me as an artist," said Peter, who served as president of the Guelph Creative Arts Association for four separate terms, and remains an active volunteer for the association. ‘‘While teaching, I would always learn something from my students. There is a sharing of ideas that happens and is so important.’’

In recent years, Peter’s preoccupations have gone from the things of the solid Earth, to those of the limitless heavens.

‘‘Over the last few years, I think I’m feeling a little more spiritual in my outlook,’’ she said, a focus that comes through in her more fluid, expressive landscape paintings, and in a series of heavily textured works she calls her Earth Treasures series — mountainous images with luminous surfaces.
‘‘I’ve gotten more interested in things like the hereafter, as I get older in my life,’’ she explained. ‘‘I’ve taken angel courses and therapeutic touch, and I’ve just become very tuned to things that are more outside of our usual acuity.’’

Her study of angelic phenomenon has instilled in her a faith and hope that there are mysterious presences that may actually assist us in life and inspire the creative process.

An artist’s preoccupations and obsessions can’t help but creep into their work, and so it is with Peter’s angel musings. The act of pondering their existence has led to seraphic images coming through in her paintings.

“Whether your feet are firmly planted on the earth or your head is drifting toward the sublime, it is always good to take up a creative activity,” the artist said. “Too many people impede their own creative side by telling themselves they have no talent,” she said. “It’s just not true — everyone has some kind of creative gift, whether it is with brush and canvas, carving tools or knitting needles. Later life is an ideal time to discover the pleasure of making art,” she said.

‘‘Tons of people are doing it. It’s a very pleasant outlet for people’s emotions, for trying something new and stimulating the brain, learning a new technique and new media.’’ Don’t let a blank page or canvas stop you.
‘‘A white canvas can be an intimidating thing,’’ said the veteran painter, who still has creative blocks of her own to overcome. ‘‘You throw some colour on it, dirty it up, relieve the stress and go. The trick is just to do it, and do it and do it, and, like anything, the more you do it the easier it gets.’’