 I thought that the only reasons I painted were because I love messing about with paint, and I love how different types of light affect colour. I also enjoy shapes and their relationships to each other.  |
 Paint the Town, Annapolis Royal August 15 - 16 2009. I am one participant among eighty or more. Sunbury Shores Arts & Nature Centre, Water Street, St Andrews, New Brunswick (Canada). September 11 - through October 6, 2009. Charlotte County Revisted, recent paintings of this region of SW New Brunswick. |
  If you would like to
purchase any of the pieces on this website, please email Helen or call902 532-1212.  |
I love being alive, alive here in Annapolis County, Nova Scotia, Canada. I love this valley; its quilt-patch fields threaded along the Annapolis River, its flanking mountains, and the ever-changing Fundy Shore behind the sheltering wall of North Mountain. I love the patterns and changing colours of the landscape, and the shapes of old houses, barns, sheds, fish stores, and wharves. I love the abstract compositions I see in parts of houses; massed roofs, overlapping sheds and ells, chimneys dancing across the sky. I also love going to the French Shore and other regions.
I paint to celebrate these subjects as well as to memorialise a landscape and way of life fast disappearing. In growing old I see what I knew as ordinary disappearing rapidly or becoming quaint. I paint because I love messing about with paints. Also I love how the light of changing weather and changing seasons affects colour, and how our Fundy tides change the coastal landscape hourly. I also enjoy shapes and their relationships to each other, especially those of buildings. I love seeing, looking at this world we live in, and recording my responses to it.
I paint on site, outdoors, up to about 150-kilometres (90-miles) from home. In Nova Scotia this includes the French Shore, the South Shore, the Annapolis Valley, and the Fundy Shore just over North Mountain from where I live. Occasionally I return to paint in the area where I used to live in New Brunswick; the Passamaquoddy Bay area, especially Deer Island NB and Eastport, Maine, as well as inland on the ridges of Charlotte County NB. I paint our landscape because of its beauty, its fragility, and our vanishing way of life, along with the changes of each season.
In winter I work mostly indoors; still lifes, house plants, and interiors express my pleasure in the dailyness of home life. This interest in home might come from having moved frequently and my fondness for building; I have designed and helped build two houses as well as planning and often helping to work on five major renovations.
I like working small (14” square at most), and I like working large (defined by what will fit into my car; currently 40 inches/one meter square). Working small is portable; I can stand on a sidewalk, sit in a restaurant, or shelter from the weather in my car. I have a more intimate relationship with a small painting.
Periodically I work very small (less than 5x7 inches): I call these tiny ones hors d'oeuvres, because they are outside my regular body of work. I use them to try out new ideas so I can finish them with time to move to expanded expressions of those ideas - or discard them. I also paint them when I need a change of pace; it is satisfying to finish something small and is a rest after finishing a large work. Sometimes, like an edible hors d'oeuvre, they precede a large painting (the main meal). Sometimes they are more like the mints served after a meal, a refreshing change for my sated appetite.
Working large uses my whole body, and I like standing before both my subject and my painting, waving my whole arm, the rest of my body following. I’m invigorated by the dance-like moves of stepping back to see the whole and forward again to paint. These larger motions put me at one with the subject; for I am dancing with the landscape while immersed in what I am painting in response to it. I am wholly involved, and that is how I like to live.
Biography
Helen Opie was born in England before WW II, went to the US with her family when her father was seconded to the British Embassy in Washington DC in 1939. After the war, she lived in several eastern states (Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine). She immigrated to New Brunswick in 1977, to Maders Cove, Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia in 1993, and moved here (Granville Ferry) from Maders Cove in 2003.
She majored in Studio Art at Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, and has a Master’s in Education from Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts. She "dropped out" of teaching to become a mother and foster mother, joining the back-to-the-land movement before hippies were invented. She returned to school for one semester at the State University of New York in 1987 (SUNY-Albany) for more courses in drawing as well as to learn stained glass working. She has taught Grade One (6-year-olds), remedial reading, gardening, and art to people of all ages.
She was taught to paint abstractly and non-objectively when in college, but turned to figurative painting after graduation. Her interest in visual perception may account for this shift: she simply enjoys having sight and celebrates that along with her love of where she lives.
Helen Opie credits Molly Lamb Bobak (of New Brunswick), Henry Purdy (of Prince Edward Island), Sharon Yates (of Maine), and Wayne Boucher (of Annapolis Royal NS), with encouraging, teaching, and enabling her to grow to the place she is now, along with many, many fine and supportive friends.
She is an anomaly, an oxymoron (brave wimp), and a small rabble-rouser, still carrying her back-to-the-land history forward. She is practising to be a very old lady.