Where the Heart Is

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, and the author of Kurlek, Margaret Laurence: The
Long Journey Home, and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

This charming picture book for adults catches the spirit of home and
family in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, situated south of Montreal. Ann
Mitchell’s naive paintings depict houses, barns, landscapes, and
people at work and (more typically) play.

In the preface, Mitchell describes the paintings as “painted
memories” of real people and places. Each painting, she writes, calls
up “a moment in time when all are united in their love for that place.
Collectively, perhaps, the paintings are social history, but for the
people who asked me

to paint them they are, quite simply, where the heart is.”
Mitchell’s paintings and texts are

idylls of family life that perfectly embody her concept of naive art as
“an affair of the heart.”