Nice bit of press for Beach Artist, Margaret Lindsay Holton

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The Beach Strip
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MAHONEY: The complex beauty of living on the Beach

Posted with permission from the Hamilton Spectator


Hamilton Spectator
By Jeff Mahoney
(November 18, 2014)
There are days when the wind troubles the water into an unholy swell and welter of spume, spindrift and clashing breakers.

There are other days when the warm stillness is hypnotizing, meditative; yet others when the icy lake and sky, glowering over a foreground of beach-under-hoarfrost, seem welded into one leaden, glacial face of doom.

Whatever is happening beyond her doorstep, Lindsay Holton has a built-in show.

She can see it through the large picture window at the back of her place on the lakefront or she can stand out in the midst of it, like a character in a Brontë novel.

Life on Beach Boulevard. Never dull.

"Every day it's something different," says Lindsay, who has photographed these surroundings, painted them, written about them.

"Sometimes you see the boats hung up in the water when the bridge is closed," as it was when a dump truck crashed into an overhead truss on the Skyway at the end of July.

She watched the boats that day, bobbing in the wash, like petitioners waiting at the gates.

This is a far reach from home for Lindsay, yet hardly a stone's throw away.

"We raised sheep, chickens and guinea hens," she says of the old farmstead where she grew up in north Burlington, daughter of the late renowned furniture maker Luther Janna Holton. Her family still owns it.

Lindsay, who is a novelist, sometime musician, painter and photographer, has lived in many places, including Switzerland, but there's something special about the beach.

I've visited since she moved here three years ago. On her walls hang many paintings, several of her own, beautifully inspired by the ambience of the beach, full of the climate and colour and semi-abstract variability of land, cloud, water and sky. Also around the room are found objects and quasi-sculptural flotsam that the beach puts on offer to the careful eye.

A big worn wooden sign looms in one corner — Dixie Southern Baptist, it says in weathered letters.

"It could have come from anywhere," says Lindsay. "Maybe down south. Or Mississauga. You find unbelievable things."

Lindsay takes me for a walk along the beach, over the sand, through the thick tall beach grass, along the paved boardwalk.

The beach stretches endlessly, it seems. She points to the movable dock of the marine rescue unit in the distance. There's a randomness to what you see and find – abandoned lawn chairs, bicycle tires.

Lindsay picks up some stones. "They're fossilized."

Indeed, I can see the shadow shapes of ancient impressions.

Behind us grow the gardens of the beach dwellers, with yucca plants, vegetables, fruit trees and rows of castor beans. Some gardens feature wonderful decorative driftwood, sculpted as much by nature as by human hand.

The water is a fantastic vastness; a freighter appears as a dot in the distance.

"It's the light, the sky, the atmosphere," says Lindsay. "It's the infinite and the finite at the same time. You could be in Nantucket."

The city seems so far away, yet so close, right over us, in the looming of the regimental hydro towers.

"They're the only blight," says Lindsay, but then we agree that even they have their mysterious attraction, like centurions of some erstwhile idea of the march of progress.

Lindsay loves the community here, the variable rhythms of the lake, beach and horizon.

It is a changing, growing community (condos going for nearly $1 million on parts of Beach Boulevard, she says), but it's still a place for poets, romantics and lovers of beauty, both forbidding and inviting.

"This could be the next arts community," says Lindsay, whose paintings are vibrantly tonal orchestrations of shape and colour field, in stylized landscapes and semi-abstract lyricism.

The Beach will find its future, as it always has. For now, for Lindsay, it's a home found.

For more on Lindsay's art, music (new Summer Haze CD) and books including Josephine's Garden, visit canadadaphotography.blogspot.com and/or acornpresscanada.com.



jmahoney@thespec.com

905-526-3306
 
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