Butter Down the Well: Reflections of a Canadian Childhood

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

Ten full-page paintings and a sprinkling of illustrations by Len Gibbs
are the highlight of this edition of Collins’s classic account of
growing up on a Saskatchewan farm during the Depression.

Gibbs works in acrylic, achieving high realism without sacrificing
personal interpretation. Study his painting long enough and you not only
start to feel the prairie wind, you’re sure you can smell the dried
gopher tails.

His work creates the perfect backdrop for Collins’s reminiscences:
the poverty of a subsistence farm during the dust-bowl 1930s, the wonder
of a world seen through the eyes of a child. Simple times. Simple joys.
It’s an unpretentious biography that captures the facts and the
feeling of a time and place unique to the Canadian experience. Without
Gibbs’s art, it is a valuable addition to our national social history;
with the addition of those evocative paintings, it gives us the illusion
of actually experiencing this special moment in history.