A Rural Life

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

Not everyone can live in a small town: indeed not everyone would really want to. Yet there is an all but irresistible back-to-one’s-roots lure about small-town life. Some adventurous people, like Ken Tolmie, realist artist, have tried city life, then escaped to the beauty and peace of the Gulf Islands of Canada’s west coast, only to return — in Tolmie’s and his family’s case, home to the Maritimes.

Over a period of eight years, Tolmie has captured the people, the animals, the surroundings, and the tempo of life in Bridgetown in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia. Familiarity with his work, as exemplified in A Rural Life, makes this small town the archetype of the almost mythical haven in which everyone at times longs to shelter. The appearance may be deceptive, however, for it is no place to hide away. Tolmie makes it very plain that townsfolk are much more exposed than city dwellers, much more pressured to participate in the life of the community. He himself has done so, as the reader may, through his superb paintings, now celebrated across the nation as the Bridgetown series.