Murmur Mermer

Murmur Mermer

14” x 9”

Acrylic Paint on Board

London, Ontario

January, 2005

Jim Kogelheide

My adventures as a Canadian artist have taken me on many journeys throughout our native lands.  For five years, I traveled and worked with community members in Manitoba, British Columbia and Nova Scotia.  In 2006 I spent a part of my summer visiting and teaching in Canada’s newest arctic territory, Nunavut.  During this time, I photographed many wonderful and interesting landscapes and several of these images have helped to inspire many of my paintings.  However, I have found no other region that captures my imagination as deeply as the area where I grew up.  My homeland – The Hills of Mulmur.

I was commissioned to create this painting by a close friend who also grew up in this area.  Joe and his family have been living in Utah for many years and he has told me that this painting stirs many happy memories from his childhood.  When he is enjoying it he doesn’t feel so far away from the rolling farmlands, big open skies and all the colours of a Canadian autumn.

 

Mr. Jim & Joe get a chance for a small reunion in 2009.  We met in Kindergarten many years ago!

We both grew up in Dufferin County, which is made up of several smaller townships.  The elementary school that we attended bused students in from the townships of Mulmur and Mono and it’s no surprise that our school was simply called Mulmur Mono Elementary School.  Now, try saying Mulmur Mono five times really fast and you will see how I used this silly tongue twister to come up with the ‘Murmur Mermer’ title for this art creation!

The texture for this painting is very interesting.  I used a very small, square shaped brush and I applied the paints in the shapes of small squares.  It looks simple enough, but let me assure you that sometimes this technique can be quite challenging.  When working on a particular area of the painting, I apply a certain paint colour to my brush and apply the paint to the canvas or board.  Then I change the colour of the paint, slightly and then I add this new colour to the canvas… and so on.  When I’m working on an area that is filled with many colours – like the round bale of hay in the foreground of the painting, I can sometimes get quite lost in all the spaces that haven’t been painted yet.  If I were to put a shade of paint in the wrong area, I wouldn’t have been able to create the illusion of the circular laying of the hay.

It was just over five years later, when I found a desire to take another look at this painting to find inspiration for another original that would soon find its way onto the wall of another life-long friend.  Here is the link to ‘The Faintest Sound’ where you will see that painting and learn how a song I wrote influenced the title.

Jim Kogelheide

2015