Cape Breton's Magazine

with white and black--to get the colour of that water that I wanted to get there. And sometimes when I wake up in the morning, I've been mixing colours for 2 or 3 hours in the night, while I'm asleep. (Do you ever feel that the old people al? most want you to do something like that?) Not that they want it, but I feel responsi? ble, that this thing shouldn't be lost: the way people lived those days, the hard? ship they went through to live, and the kind of lives. Of course, it was best to them because they didn't know any differ? ent or there wasn't any other way to live. That was the circumstances. And I figure if I can put that down so people can remem? ber it, I'm satisfied, I've done it. I think it matters a whole lot, that peo? ple know what was. It may make people feel how easy we're getting by in one sense com? pared to the hardships they had. We don't have to put up with all that to live today. It would be nice for people to know, the youngsters, what went on and how our par? ents lived. I think it would be. Because there was nobody that could paint, only me, I know them. They didn't paint before, like I said, and they didn't know that story. I paint it so to preserve it. So it's not perished, not just lost with the wind, like tearing down a beautiful struc? ture hundreds of years old is wasted. (Is a photograph the same thing?) No. I'll tell you. If you take a photograph.... Now let me explain it this way: There's all kinds of music and language and everything going on right here that's being broadcast from broadcasting stations and we don't hear it, isn't there? The house is full of it. But; you turn this thing on, the radio, and you'll get it. That's mechanical. Now I can take a photograph that I take with a camera--that's mechanical. Every process of taking that picture is mechanical. It's vibrations that bring that sound to a sound, it's a thing that you don't feel or see--it's vibrations, and you can make that into a sound with the right equipment, see? That screen on the television shows you what the vibrations look like. They look like a picture. The vibrations from my mind and what I'm thinking, that pic? ture is here--it has come from my mind to the canvas. I make it with the brush as my mind tells me, and that's made with vibrations that went through a human brain, not a machine. It's a different thing. How would I know what red was if my brain didn't tell me what red was? That red, that comes right through that brush, and that brush makes what that picture is in your mind. Well, that went through a human body, all that paint. The other one's just a camera--a machine made that. They don't look like the same thing, like the thing you're looking at. They haven't got the depth. They haven't got the living thing in them as the painting has got. What really brought me into painting was the taxidermy work I was doing. If I'd go to mount a sparrow or a fish or something, I had to think of the background in the case that was going to go with it. And that had to be painted pretty darn good. So I used to do that, too. And that old black house that was burnt, every wall in that house had a painting on it that I'd put on the plaster. Right on the walls. I had a big old hound that was half fox and half beagle. And I painted his picture on the plaster wall. And his ears were terri? ble long. I painted the frame on the wall, and I painted his ears out over the frame. And a fellow came down to get a deer head mounted. "My god," he says, "you mounted the old dog!" And I had a painting of the Known for CXrality Products and Careful Service ?? Jewelery and Gifts MadDonald Jewelery Limited 357 Oiarlotte St., Sydney • 864-8318 Ideal Ice Cream Co. Ltd. A Complete Line of Frozen Foods Ice Cream and Fountain Supplies 162 Prince Street Sydney 56??-45??9 . FINDLAY OVAL Eligible for Grant of up to $800 The Alternate Energy Shop 500 Esplanade, Sydney 539-0238 (24) Tourist Brochures & Colour Printing A Specialty PRINTERS 180 TOWNSENO STREET, SYDNEY, H.: TELEPHONE (902) 564-8245