The author Wallace Stegner said ‘I may not know who I am, but I know where I’m from.’
Wallace Stegner lived in eight States in the USA, and in Eastend, Saskatchewan, which he wrote about in his 1962 autobiography Wolf Willow: A History, A Story and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier. Eastend is located on the east end of the Cypress Hills. Stegner and his family moved from the US to homestead near Eastend in 1914 when he was five years old and left Saskatchewan in 1920 when he was eleven.
I was born in Maple Creek, Saskatchewan, on the north edge of the Cypress Hills and spent my early years on a farm in that area and in the village of Golden Prairie, twenty-two miles north and eight miles west of Maple Creek (see the map below).
I don’t think that either Stegner or I actually left southern Saskatchewan.
In 2008 I had the privilege of spending two weeks as Artist in Residence at the Wallace Stegner House in Eastend. I’ll be back in the open country and in the Cypress Hills later this year.
This exhibition is another in my series of books and exhibitions about Golden Prairie. My thanks to Dan Bagan of Modern Painters Gallery and my wife Merle for organizing and preparing this exhibition. Thanks also to Dan for writing the Artist Biography and Commentary which is on his website.
Join us if you’re in Edmonton on March 4, or drop by the Gallery later in the month. Contact Dan at the the Gallery for more information.
JM
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