I have just come from Barbara’s home and studio this
morning, catching up a bit with each other, and I picked up my copy of the
hardback version. It is a stunningly well designed book, very well written,
carefully rendered photos and stories, plus the bonus of Barbara’s life story
which deserved this beautifully archived treasury format. I want you to
consider buying this coffee table book, 'Places of Her Heart'. It's astounding,
like her.
While Barbara is the teller of her personal story,
K.Jane Watt, an award winning author sat with Barbara for many Mondays,
researched and wrote the material that surrounds a 200 colour reproductions
from Barbara's growing body of work.
Places of Her Heart, The Art and Life of Barbara
Boldt, by K. Jane Watt, is an inspiring story describing how a woman came our
of war ravaged Germany and KLV camps, immigrated to Canada, married and raised
a family, and was born as an artist in the midst of heartbreaking life circumstances
and has found beauty in nature which she invites us all to enjoy through her
paintings. General readers, students of Canadian immigration, women’s history,
Canadian art, art history, and the regional paintings of BC’s Gulf Islands and
the Fraser Valley will find this book of interest.
In our area you can find a copy at Wendel's Book Store in Fort Langley
and also at Birthplace of B.C. Gallery.
It can also purchased on Amazon,
or why not have Barbara sign one for
you at her gallery. It is available at the Langley Centennial Museum.
Barbara's Information: Address: 25340
84 Ave, Langley, BC V1M 3N2
Jane
Nicol has written a consummate review of the book and the
authors, and I use that here with gratitude to Janet, and for the sake of
encouraging readers to purchase this memorable keep sake. There is no point in seeking to say what
Janet has written so ably on her blog.
"Barbara Boldt, a Fraser Valley artist, aged 82, has been
painting British Columbia landscapes and portraits since the 1970s. Her biography
was shaped by K. Jane Watt, an accomplished historian, who visited her
regularly for coffee on Monday mornings. Their conversations turned to formal
interviews, resulting in a coffee table book offering a rare glimpse of a
German-Canadian’s life journey, accompanied by visually rich art work begun in
Boldt’s middle years. Watt also had access to Boldt’s family archives and
personal papers. Some of these treasured items, including drawings by the
artist’s 19th century ancestors, also find their way in these pages.
We learn of Boldt’s comfortable childhood in the 1930s in rural
Germany, on a patch of land named Stiegenhof, in the north Rhine-Westphalia
region. The advent of the Second World War and Boldt’s father’s enlistment in
the army are detailed. The war years, the bombings, the splitting up of
family—and miraculous reunion is also chronicled. “This remembrance of loss can
be multiplied millions of times over in the lives of others in wartime,” the
author observes. “There can be no going back, no return to what once existed.”
These memories will come to haunt and inform Boldt’s art.
In 1952, when Boldt was 22, her family immigrated to Canada.
Boldt eventually married and raised three children in Nelson, later moving to
Vancouver. Boldt first realized the magnitude of the German peoples’
culpability for the Jewish holocaust during her years in Nelson, having read an
article in Time magazine. She also acknowledged her nation’s collective shame
and the silences within her family.
After her children left home, Boldt began taking art lessons.
Art soon became a passion that her marriage could not sustain and in 1980 Boldt
divorced. “This period was both a time of letting go of the old and of leaping
in to the new,” the author observes. Boldt moved to Fort Langley area and began
to explore her ancestral roots, proud of the many artists in her family tree.
She reflected more deeply about her own past as well. As her art
education progressed, Boldt developed a preference for realism, using the
mediums of oils, pastels and watercolors. She also found working in her studio,
using photographs she has taken of a landscape or person, suited her better
than painting in the outdoors, on site. “Using a realistic style, I’d rather
discover than invent the pattern and design in nature which a casual observer
might fail to see,” she says. The author notes Boldt’s landscapes sometimes
have an abstract quality—“of stone shaped by wind and tide.”
This is particularly evident after Boldt takes on a younger
lover named Graydon. Her paintings flourish as she paints the mystery and
beauty of the Alberta “Badlands” and the caves of Gabriola Island—as well as
numerous portraits of Graydon. Among Boldt’s studies of stone is “Gaia”, a
Greek word meaning “Mother Earth.” Her oil paintings of a favored Gulf Island
site she calls “Gaia,” depict a rocky shoreline with honeycomb-like patterns
and has a sensual quality. “Her paintings illuminate a world that seems static
but catch a moment in time, a fleeting quality of light, a place on the cusp of
change,” the author observes.
Boldt’s numerous exhibits, include a Fort Langley show in the
1990s, entitled “True to my Heart.” The exhibit was built around “seeing her
life through the lens of her childhood self as it juxtaposed images of childhood
with new work” the author writes. “It was a compendium of special times and
visions that had made Barbara who she was as a woman, mother, friend and
artist.”
The economic difficulties of being an artist and a single, older
woman have been part of Boldt’s reality. Like many creative people, Boldt has
also faced, reluctantly, the many time-consuming tasks involved in marketing
her art. She has persisted, despite these challenges. Most difficult for Boldt
has been the tragic loss of two of her children, both in their middle years.
She confessed the pain will never pass, in a letter to a newspaper, where she
addressed her losses, but also affirmed the importance of moving on. “I am a
painter,” she wrote. “I like to paint the ever-rejuvenating miracle and beauty
of Nature, fully aware that what has grown also must die in time.”
In 2000 Boldt moved from the Fort Langley neighborhood to nearby
Glen Valley where she continues to teach art and holds open houses. Her art is
masterful, as the final pages of reproductions in the book prove, her
landscapes expansive and awe-inspiring. “The subject must be meaningful to me,”
she says. “To my experience, to my memory—and it must be working from
photographs that I have taken myself.” Included as well is a detailed appendix of
Boldt’s prolific art and an index.
In the ‘Afterward’, the author offers her own thoughtful
reflections about Boldt. The artist’s life stories are both “fiercely
individual and surprisingly universal,” Watt believes. Boldt’s art is a
reflection of the world around her, the author also contends, a “beauty that
comes from simply being over time.” Time spent among these pages of text and
images will surely lead the reader to agree.”
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