Mom Art

Selma Lazarus: Montreal Winter Scene, oil on panel, some time in the 1970s.   I’ve long held that the creative process is essentially the same, no matter what art form you’re working in. I think I learned this from my mother. Mom was an artist – a painter, printmaker, and quilter – and, without knowing it at the time, I learned a lot about my own favourite art form, playwriting, by watching her paint. Mom enjoyed modest but reasonable success. She studied with Group of Seven painter Arthur Lismer, and she exhibited her work every year in the Montreal Museum of Art Spring Show. One year she had a one-woman exhibition in L.A. On another occasion the Montreal Star ran an article about her, and my teacher, Mrs. Levitsky, put the clipping up on the blackboard, making Mom, briefly, a celebrity among my classmates.  Her painting studio was in the basement of our house. She would work from found photographs or still lifes, or she’d photograph landscapes, take the photos home and create paintings based on them. I sometimes hung out in the basement while she worked, and she’d explain to me what she was doing. She never talked about