Evelyn Stork reception draws many admirers

Alf Stork, a keen woodworker, made many of Evelyn’s frames.

By Marcus Day

Maple Creek News

For Heather Turgeon, her great aunt, Evelyn Stork, has always been an inspiration. As a child, she would watch her painting in the Cypress Hills, thinking how wonderful it would be to do something like that.

Now she is a guest artist with Evelyn’s exhibition at the Jasper Cultural & Historical Centre, The Sky Is Still The Limit: A Retrospective, which features 47 paintings.

“I’ve always loved her winter scenes, and the way she paints snow, which is a reflection of the sky,” said Heather, who is exhibiting three of her own paintings at the show. “It isn’t just white.”

Evelyn’s niece, Karen Turgeon, is also drawn to the snowy landscapes. Asked to pick out a favourite, she pointed to one called Mountain View.

“I love the clouds in front of the mountains,” she said.

For David Jenkins, the Jasper’s museum manager, Evelyn’s oil painting, Changing Of The Guard, is a standout. It shows a grain elevator silhouetted against a yellowing sky.

“There is an elegiac feel to it and was obviously painted by someone with deep feeling for, and someone who has been observing for a long time, the beautiful and important things in our community, including beautiful and important things we have lost.”

The painting was shown at an earlier exhibition.

“After that show was over and for whatever various reasons Ev hadn’t picked it up yet I hung that picture in the office, where it stayed for a number of weeks. I liked looking at it. It reminded me of the reasons I had come here to Maple Creek. When she came for it I didn’t want to let it go. But, sizing her up, I decided I better not argue with her.”

These reflections on Evelyn Stork’s work came during a rapturous reception for the artist at the Jasper Centre on Saturday afternoon. About 60 people, including numerous family members, attended, keen to show appreciation for Evelyn the artist and Evelyn the person.

In his introduction, Jenkins said he was enormously fond of Evelyn, whose intelligence and good humour always gave him a lift.

He also pointed out that Evelyn recently celebrated her 90th birthday.

“So those are two good starting points to host a show of Evelyn Stork’s. But the primary reason we are gathered here is because Ev is a wonderful and sensitive artist who has been working on and honing her craft for decades. And because she is a talented chronicler of place, that place being the place many of us love most in the world, the Cypress Hills and Maple Creek. We are fortunate to witness such an impressive body of work. We are fortunate to have her and the art she has made out of the stuff of our lives.”

Jenkins added that although Evelyn was very much her own person, she seemed almost the epitome of a certain type of smart, hardworking, sensible prairie women he remembered from growing up and visiting his grandparents in Maple Creek as a boy.

“The kind of women who held these communities together, kept them going. The kind of woman to whom we owe so much.

“I say sensible but we are lucky that Ev wasn’t so perfectly sensible that she wouldn’t take the time to sit down in front of a scene, breathe it in, and then lovingly and painstakingly recreate it into art.

“Art is rarely perfectly sensible, but my Lord we need it. What would we do without it?”

Jenkins said Evelyn throughout her life has been building a legacy of family, community and art.

Evelyn, a member of Maple Creek Art Club since its inception, said the first advice she received as an aspiring artist was: “Paint what you know and love”.

As a child of the Cypress Hills, what she knew and loved were the landscapes around her.

She developed two ways of painting, she said – to work from a photograph or “just start out”, using imagination as a guide.

After going to Medicine Hat to get her first three paintings framed, she decided the expense was unsustainable. Fortunately, her husband, Alf, was an avid woodworker, who enjoyed making such items as toys, toy boxes, jewellery boxes and cutting boards for family members.

“When I began painting, he was able to help with framing by making new ones or cutting one down to size and he also refinished them.”

Eveyln, who has used many mediums, including oil, pastels and pencils, advised all would-be artists: “Just try it.”