Grandson Nathan had a great time visiting Cochrane this summer and a couple of days before he left it was a cooking hot day and we decided to go to Dairy Queen. Now Nathan loves the Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Blizzard treat and my dessert of choice is the Peanut Buster Parfait. As we were waiting at the counter I spotted, in the corner, a piece of art that was for auction. To my surprise it was a collection of three prints called “Coastal Scenes” by one of Sue and my favourite artists Maud Lewis.
A little bit about Maud.
“Maud Kathleen Lewis was a Canadian folk artist From Nova Scotia. Lewis lived most of her life in poverty in a small house in Marshalltown, Nova Scotia, achieving national recognition in 1964 and 1965. Several books, plays and films have since been produced about her. Lewis used bright colours in her paintings, and subjects were often flowers or animals, including oxen team, horses, birds, deer or cats. Many of her paintings are of outdoor scenes, including Cape Island boats bobbing on the water, horses pulling a sleigh, skaters and portraits of dogs, cats, deer, birds, and cows. Her paintings were inspired by childhood memories of the landscape and people around Yarmouth and South Ohio, as well as Digby locations such as Point Prim and Bayview.”
I’ve seen these pictures and memorabilia up for auction at a number of locations around Cochrane, but until now I was never interested in making a bid. As Nathan and I enjoyed our ice creams we talked strategy. The starting bid was $200 but we had noticed that several bidding forms had already been removed from the pad. Nathan suggested maybe try $210 but I said that that had probably been done. We talked about $220 but finally decided to go with $221. We finished our ice cream, put the bid in the container and headed home.
Three weeks later I received a call from Funding Innovations saying I had won the bid, and they would be sending the painting in the mail.
A week later a package arrived and Sue had just returned home from visiting our son, Calum, in Wales. When I opened the package she was thrilled and the best thing was that the $221 went to the Alberta Children’s Hospital. In fact since 2015 over $14,000,000 has been raised for charities through these art auctions.
Now that’s worth making a bid on.
© 2024 Martin Parnell
