The Illuminated Life of Maud Lewis

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.

Medieval manuscripts were “illuminated” by beautifully painted
capital letters and floral borders. This “illuminated biography,”
with its nicely punning title, combines the life story of a folk artist
with scores of color photographs of her cheerful paintings. The
biography and the paintings, perfectly complementary, reveal a social
history of Nova Scotia along with the story of an unusual life told with
self-deprecating humor, sensitivity, and wit.

Lance Woolaver grew up near Maud Dowley (1903–70) in a small Nova
Scotia town and came to appreciate the value of her paintings only as an
adult, after seeing the bold colors and brushwork of Vincent Van Gogh.
International award-winning photojournalist Bob Brooks also knew Maud
personally.

At 34, Maud met and married a local bachelor who owned a small one-room
house. The doors, windows, and walls of Everett Lewis’s cheaply built
house would become her canvases. As a child, Woolaver saw Everett as
“the Crooked Old Man in the Crooked Little House,” and Maud as a
fairy-tale witch. The biographer cleverly takes us with him as he moves
from childhood incomprehension to a sympathetic admiration for Maud’s
difficulties: poverty, crippling arthritis, and a stubborn, miserly
husband. Her paintings of cats, oxen, horses pulling sleighs, children
playing, and small boats at sea depart from realism in order to please
and amuse the viewer.

Maud’s tiny house has been bought by the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia,
a leader in the field of folk art, and is being restored. Her paintings
will tour Canada in 1997–98. The book and the paintings testify to an
inner world of color and joy drawn out of a daily existence of poverty
and pain.