{"id":22536,"date":"2018-12-22T01:40:46","date_gmt":"2018-12-22T06:40:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=22536"},"modified":"2018-12-22T01:40:46","modified_gmt":"2018-12-22T06:40:46","slug":"acclaimed-artist-helen-lucas-finds-beauty-in-nature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/acclaimed-artist-helen-lucas-finds-beauty-in-nature\/","title":{"rendered":"Acclaimed artist Helen Lucas finds beauty in nature"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n

Growing up in Saskatoon in the 1930s and 40s, first generation Canadian Helen Lucas grew up in very strict Greek family.
\nHer friends in school were a little bit too fast for her conservative parents\u2019 liking \u2013 after all, they wore lipstick, and some of them even dated!
\nBy her own admission, Ms. Lucas grew up as a \u201cloner\u201d who often took solace outdoors, helping her mother tend the beautiful garden at The Ritz, the unlikely name of a 25-room hotel in the Saskatchewan city her father happened to win in an all-night poker game.
\n\u201cMy parents came from a remote mountain village in Greece,\u201d she recalls. \u201cThey had no church, no school, no nothing there; just trees for grapes that they would ship off to the big city. That was their survival. If there was any space left over, it was for vegetables, so my mother had this wonderful front garden here in Canada.\u201d
\nFlowers were a significant part of her formative years, but it was decades before they would become her life\u2019s work. Now 87, Helen Lucas is an artist acclaimed worldwide for her vivid depictions of flowers and a retrospective her work is now on at the Aurora Cultural Centre through December 29.
\nEntitled \u201cWhy Do I Paint Flowers?\u201d the exhibition serves to answer that very question, and Ms. Lucas doesn\u2019t shy away from elaborating on her answer.
\n\u201cWhen I graduated from OCAD, I was a figurative painter and had done a lot of work and shows overseas,\u201d says the King-based artist. \u201cOne day, I was working on a figurative work with blue paint and the paint wasn\u2019t moving the way I wanted, so I threw down my brush and was doing it by hand. When I took off my hand, there was the most incredible image in the paint. It was like a hand, but it had other shapes and lines going up and down. I looked and all I could see was a flower. There was nothing else that could be that intricate and beautiful.\u201d
\nHit with a brainstorm, Ms. Lucas rushed to her local florist and asked for some irises. The florist checked their stock and came out with a prime specimen.
\n\u201cI said, \u2018Oh, my god! They\u2019re beautiful! I have never seen anything like it!\u2019 and the florist probably thought I was crazy. She asked, \u2018Madam, how many would you like.\u2019 I said, \u2018Three.\u2019 \u2018Three dozen?\u2019 she asked. No, just three. So, I bought three and just came home.\u201d
\nThe number three plays a big part in Ms. Lucas\u2019 life. A religious woman \u2013 \u201cI\u2019m 87, so it is good to be in good terms!\u201d \u2013 she has used the mantra of \u201cFather, Son, and Holy Spirit\u201d as her mantra whenever she has felt anxious.
\n\u201cIt got to a point about eight years ago when I was saying that more and more, so I narrowed it down to just the word \u2018three\u2019 and now everything I do relates to \u2018three\u2019 \u2013 no painting in this exhibition took more than three days to complete.\u2019 That has become my magic number.\u201d
\nIf \u201cthree\u201d is her magic number, the sunflower might just be her talisman.
\nOver her decades of work, Ms. Lucas\u2019 name has become almost synonymous with the imposing, beautiful yellow flower. She\u2019s comfortable with the association, counting the species as her favourite.
\n\u201cThere is something very spiritual about sunflowers, especially when you see the really big ones,\u201d she says, noting she\u2019s currently working on a painting depicting rows upon rows of sunflowers reminiscent of the undulating fields of France. \u201cFlowers are as old as ancient man and each came up on their own. Each flower is different, they then seed themselves and grow and grow. I think flowers are important, as important almost as man.
\n\u201cI hope people leave the gallery with some joy and maybe connect with some of that spiritual feeling. While flowers don\u2019t last for long, I try to paint that beauty to last. I want them to have a memory,\u201d she adds, confiding that her greatest number of commissions these days come from mothers who bring her their daughters\u2019 wedding bouquets to be immortalized in paint. \u201cI just paint the memory of their beauty and that\u2019s what people want to take away. Flowers are joyous and a gift from the Lord. We should enjoy them, knowing that life is fleeting.\u201d<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Growing up in Saskatoon in the 1930s and 40s, first generation Canadian Helen Lucas grew up in very strict Greek family.
\nHer friends in school were a little bit too fast for her conservative parents\u2019 liking \u2013 after all, they wore lipstick, and some of them even dated!
\nBy her own admission, Ms. Lucas grew up as a \u201cloner\u201d who often took solace outdoors, helping her mother tend the beautiful garden at The Ritz, the unlikely name of a 25-room hotel in the Saskatchewan city her father happened to win in an all-night poker game. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":22503,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[27,4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-and-culture","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/2018-12-20-04.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-5Ru","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-18 05:08:49","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22536"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22536\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}