Some people arrive at more than one juncture at the same time.
Yvonne Coutu recently moved to Prince George and she recently arrived, too, at a more internal destination.That confluence is on display now on the walls of Cafe Voltaire at Books & Company.
"I've done a lot of sketches, pencil work, just dooling, but I always wanted to become a painter. That's been a goal forever," said Coutu. "I never had the time, or if I did I didn't have the money, because let's face it, it's not cheap to get started. But I learned, I slowly developed, I spent a lot of time on YouTube, and when I did start, really start, I could not stop."
A year's worth of work is on display at the downtown cafe gallery. Almost all of the works in the show are acrylic on canvas due to the swift drying of acrylics, which suits Coutu's busy artistic mind.
"Just because you start out painting a tree doesn't mean the final work has anything to do with a tree," she said. "I go where my imagination takes me. I don't know where it's going to end up, I just go at it."
She also does abstract practices like "dirty pours" and layered scraping to achieve eye-catching effects.
The recent giving over to painting was not coincidental with her move to Prince George from Ontario. She had been living in the Kitchener area but felt a pull to be with her daughter who had set up a thriving business here a few years ago. It was she, Patricia Carr, with her entrepreneurial spirit from her K9 Kelp artisan business, who spotted the opportunities for her mother's art skills.
"She's the culprit," said Coutu. "My darling daughter became my agent basically before I knew I had some kind of career myself. She encouraged me in all the right ways. Becoming a commercial artist was never something I would have seen for myself, but she did."
As a retiree, Coutu has the full range of the clock and calendar to do her work, and being new to the vocation also means she's eager.
"A couple of weeks is the longest I've gone between painting sessions. I can get distracted by things going on in life, but it pulls me back. If I run into problems it's usually when I'm thinking about it too much and I get stuck with all the choices," Coutu explained. "But I'll get up at two o'clock in the morning and go to work on something if I get struck by an urge to try something."
She has a small apartment and was forced to recently purchase a proper easel "so I could at least eat at my dining room table again."
She has another art show already booked for spring of 2018. Her current show, her personal and Prince George debut, is on now at Cafe Voltaire for the month of November. It is free to examine in amongst the books and coffee tables.
