The letter H may stand for Hello and Hasta la vista, as it relates to artist Audrey McKinnon. The painter was a staple of the local media community, a respected voice from the Prince George bureau of CBC Radio, and she was just gaining prominence as an artist, when work called her away from the north.
"I already miss P.G. and my CBC-PG family. They were huge for me and that chapter was one of the best chapters in my life," she said from her new home in Kelowna. McKinnon is the current host of the afternoon magazine program Radio West. She joked that Prince George listeners now hear her more in absentia than when she was covering news based here in our own city.
"What I love about Prince George is, there's no bullshit. Prince George isn't trying to be something it's not. I miss that rugged realness already."
If she made an impact on Prince George in the two years she lived here, Prince George also made an impact on her. The travails of life meant she could not focus on art as she once did, as she so wished to do as a full-time profession. She went to Langara University's journalism program and almost immediately channeled into working at the CBC.
"I stopped painting until I got to Prince George, and it opened up all these avenues for me again," she said. "The arts scene in P.G. was quite accessible. It was kind of an accident that it got started there for me, but once it started, it just kept happening. I kept being invited into opportunities like the Back Alley Art Project, I got to compete in Art Battle, then the Alphabet Project came along."
Flip through the below slideshow to view the Alphabet Project art and a link to each artist story:
This latter initiative caused her to think back to her beginnings as an artist. She got started by being an inattentive elementary school student who would wile away the boring times in class by doodling on her notebooks. Big block letters were among her favourite passtimes, "and here I was... working with a letter of the alphabet again."
After elementary school, her offhand interest kicked into high passion. High school art classes blew her thinking open to the possibility of being a professional. Art's processes and results spoke to her.
Her family meandered in their living arrangements. She spent parts of her childhood in Bella Coola, throughout the Lower Mainland, she graduated in Mission then moved out on her own into Vancouver. She worked "at a shoddy little hole-in-the-wall gallery, but after awhile I didn't like being around people who were doing full-time what I wanted to do but wasn't because I was in there working with them."
She built up some adventures and experiences, like a prolonged trip to Trinidad where she did an internship at a design company. She also started a family, and that seemed better done back closer to her support systems back home, so a return to Canada was in order. Now she is finding an equilibrium between being a mom, being a professional broadcaster, and being an artist.
"This project really challenged me. I love it when I'm given a straightforward confine, but then let loose to do what I like within that," she said.
"I didn't want it to be an image of something else, I wanted it to be an H, and I wanted it to be lower case," she said, after considerable thinking and experimenting. "H is quiet, but it has impact. Its sound is almost a non-sound. I tried so many things, and so many materials. I even tried moulding it out of pieces of clothing. It was all fun. It's not one of those letters that has seamless lines, and it's not super-pretty, necessarily, so I had the challenge of this imbalanced letter and come up with something that would make you want to look at again and again and perhaps consider what it means."
She gravitated to softer colours, to delicate features, in deference to its voice. "It's something you almost don't say when you say it out loud," she said. Finally, in a different art project, she spotted the colour tone she wanted from her paint. Then she set to work turning that into shapes - smoky, oily, intermingled with gentle chemistry (using an eyedropper, in fact) that evoked the ghostly whisper of a sound it makes when spoken aloud on its own - the sound of a slight air current loaded in the mood of the moment: the sound of a runner's breath, the sound of fear, the sound of sex, the sound of disbelief, the sound of relief, the sound of satisfaction when you put the brush down and first admire the version that ignites your creative senses.
