Maud
Lewis
(1903 - 1970)
Nova Scotia's Most Famous Folk Artist
Maud Lewis was born in Yarmouth County, Nova Scotia. As a child she was stricken with polio which crippled her arms, deformed her hands and affected her neck. She did not often raise her head, but when she did, her clear blue-gray eyes lit up her face like candles. She was small, slight and alert.
She married Everett Lewis and used to accompany her husband on his rounds selling fish. To make some money, she began drawing Christmas cards. When sales were encouraging, she tried her hand at painting. Maud never had a lesson, never saw a painting in her life and the only traveling she did was when the Lewis's moved to Marshalltown, just outside of Digby, where Mr. Lewis found employment as a night watchman at the local "poorhouse".
There they lived in a tiny house (9 feet by 10 and a half feet) - only one room with a loft above. The furniture consisted of a cast-iron woodstove, one chair, one table holding Maud's brushes and tubes of paint, a sofa and some shelves for groceries. A most unprepossessing inventory and Maud must have thought so to because she decorated every available surface with brightly colored flowers, birds and butterflies, from the front door and only window to the front of the warming oven on the stove, the pots and pans, to the steps leading to the loft.
They had no electricity, no running water and very likely they did not take the daily paper. But they did have a vegetable garden, the most beautiful sweetpeas, several cats, a dog, a tame crow and a fat trout, whose name was Fred, in the well.
Maud used Simple and straightforward materials -- wall board and tubes of Tinsol, an oil based paint. She would cover the piece of wallboard with a coat of white, draw an outline of what she was going to paint and on would go the color. She never blended or mixed, her colors came directly out of the tube. The size of her paintings was limited by the extent she could move her arms.
What did she paint? Outdoor scenes -- there is not one indoor painting amongst the lot. There are Cape Island style fishing boats bobbing on the water, horses pulling a sleigh, a surrey with a fringe on top, a model T, dogs, horses, but above all oxen, massive oxen with the most appealing come-hither eyes and mascara eyelashes.
Noted Nova Scotia artist John Cook gave Maud full marks for composition and sense of perspective. He liked her broad lines and fresh ideas. Maud died in 1970, but her heart-warming paintings live on in public and private collections throughout the world. One delighted owner once said: "Mrs. Lewis paints what we dream about."
(Excerpted from the brochure "Maud Lewis: A Nova Scotia Native Artist", 1974)
