Beverly Crossing (sketch for a work in progress)
Beverly, Saskatchewan is a small hamlet just west of Swift Current. It is accessed by a rural gravel road, and flanked on either side by two major transit corridors: the Trans Canada Highway and the CP rail line. To travel further up this gravel road, over the train crossing and up the hill, one will find the former farmstead of the artist’s grandparents.
The prairie landscape of is one of extremes. Extremes made more evident not only by the prominent horizon which so clearly demarcates the meeting point between the sky and the ground, but also how its space is simultaneously experienced as both flatness and depth. It is a landscape which makes one highly aware of both the vast distance which stretches away from you and the small and intimate detail beneath one’s feet.
The experience of being slowed then held at a rural crossing before a passing train is both one of awakened senses to the surrounding world (the rhythmic disruption of sight and sound), and, of suspension, where one’s sensory attention to the world turns inward – the mind drifts elsewhere, waiting, waiting in complete stasis as the world rumbles past.
[This work was started shortly after returning home to Saskatchewan for the funeral of my Grandpa. It remains unfinished.]
