Low Down Articles
Artist Profiles - Wendy MacIntyre
Article 38 of 73
From the book Artists of the Gatineau Hill by Catherine Joyce. This article first appeared in the "Artist Profiles" column in the July 13, 2005 issue of the The Low Down to Hull and Back News.
Reprinted with permission. Search complete list of Low Down Articles.
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Painting with Words
Wendy MacIntyre has been working as a writer in the Gatineau Hills for over 17 years. "The hills are very protective. They are like sleeping animals that ring you round with strength and wisdom."
The hills remind her of Scotland where she was born. Although she came to Canada at the age of five, she has never forgotten the feel of the Scottish landscape, particularly the quality of light and the shape of the hills. Before the family emigrated, her mother took her to Edinburgh for a ride through the cobblestone streets in a horse-drawn carriage. "It left a tremendous impression - that first glimpse of the fairy-tale Castle atop the rock, that first gleaning of the doomed fate of Mary Queen of Scots." Years later she would return to Scotland to study English Literature at the University of Edinburgh.
Growing up in Ottawa, where she went to Glebe Collegiate and Carleton University, Wendy knew early on she wanted to write. "I have always been addicted to stories. Yet I love the visual impact of art. I want to use words as a painter uses colour to create a world so real, so fresh and vivid that you can step right into it. It is the clear, visual image that I am after. If my readers say 'It's like being there!' then I know I have succeeded in what I want to achieve."
Wendy takes long walks to absorb the quiet, to listen to the stories that float up. She supports herself as a speechwriter for various government departments, and also tries to find time for reading books that both teach and inspire her. She admires writers like the English novelist Penelope Fitzgerald and the Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie who can convey so much through what they leave unsaid, so that the very spaces between the words are eloquent and charged with meaning"
Wendy's own themes are universal. Her first novel Mairi - set in Scotland during the Highland Clearances - exprores unrequited love, that intense state of yearning that is often more satisfying than its fulfillment. Her most recent novel, The Applecross Spell, explores the search for elusive truth: that all too human state in which we believe we have found an ideal, only to discover that this situation is not at all what it seemed. In early 2007, she published her first fiction for young nadults: Apart, a novel in letters co-authored with Saskatchewan writer R.P. MacIntyre.
With the help of a Toronto agent, Wendy is seeking a publisher for her current noveL Lucia's Masks - a postapocalyptic fiction about cultural terror, the human capacity for endurance and the deep need for art, myth and ritual.
"We cannot be fully human without meaningful ritual forms: ritual makes visible the mythic dimension behind what we are doing and responds to the soul's need for sustenance. I fear for the barrenness of today's culture - its obsession with violence and wealth and superficial perfection. We live with a sad voyeurism rather than an ethic based on kindness and compassion that would give us nourishment in our lives."