Terrill Welch by herself - issue #36 Quiet Drama in a Live-Work Space
Morning comes on soft barefoot steps across our heated floors to a modest open kitchen. My fingers curl around the worn handheld coffee grinder. I reach for daylight across the rolling mist of the valley composed by large wood-framed windows. Then I slowly turn inward, both mentally and physically, from the sanctuary of the aging blue wicker chair in the corner of my art studio. The quiet drama in a live-work space offers little escape except to walk out the door, away from one’s life and one’s work.
Thankfully, I seldom feel the urge to escape other than to bring fresh inspiration to further the layers within this rich and nurturing existence. Morning has fled into midday activities such as making sure the gallery pod lights are on and I have turned the sign to open at the gate.
This is the backdrop for this month’s issue of Terrill Welch by herself.
‘Golden Evening Across the Strait of Georgia’, ‘Sliced with a Tear’ and ‘Winter Light in the Maples’ paintings offering a collage through time and place. This is time year is such a season of gratitude!
This is a clump of maple trees beside the sea that I visit with again and again. There is something about autumn by the sea with the gray melancholy wrapped in fall colours. The days are short and the afternoon sun barely reaches around the island hills to the Maple Trees. The winter light of late autumn dances across the sea and sky. Some place on the other side of the Strait of Georgia, high up in the coastal mountains, it is snowing. One must wait until later in the day for this light… but not too late.
Another collage of moments included a car picnic with a short beach walk, followed by admiring the fall leaves in the tree at the back of the house when we returned home.
Later, I made ‘French Dijon Chicken with White Wine Cream Sauce’ or ‘poulet à la moutarde’ using some new mustard from France that I had purchased with a few new spices from The Spice Trader in Toronto. To top everything off in the evening, I wandered out and used my phone to see some faint northern lights.
Then, I ordered our online European Union Film Festival ticket that opens December 1st, right when I am finished my second of three units for my MA in Fine Art! I also ordered the latest memoir of sorts by Margaret Atwood. I love having something amazing to look forward to doing!
It was a good day that still lingers with all its precious wonder!
WHAT IS NEW OFF MY EASEL
These latest two paintings seem to be connected in palette and sentiment. The connection is unintended and likely speaks more to my common state of being during the painting process rather than anything else.
A BLADE OF GREEN PAINTING
Reference Gathering:
The references were gathered over a few days between Tuesday, 7 October and Friday, 17 October 2025. I didn’t use everything in this constructed landscape for the painting but these were all influences, along with my memory, on the final work.
Making Process:
I am using a different oil paint brand, Michael Harding, which covers well and has a heavy pigment load. As usual it takes a bit to learn the intricacies of a new paint but I am happy with it so far. The process went forward without a pause on this small surface between 10:00 am and noon.
Finished Painting:
Making Notes:
Between spells of rain, the days seem to hang on a low, filtered autumn sun. Everything is heavy, slippery and muted against the wool of my sweater as I crouch low to the seabed between the sandstone reefs. The only bright spot is a blade of seaweed draping over the shells like garnish on a sushi plate.
Abstract shapes are filled with energetic marks and then wiped away, only to be scrapped back into yet again. In the end, lively figurative expression rules this landscape of small.
My reparative approach to this work is related to recent heartbreak and grief that comes with a diagnosis for the condition of a significant other in my life. It was not an unexpected outcome of the assessment but there is an additional finality when a specialist delivers their knowledgeable conclusions. Now to get on with living and keeping my emotional resiliency as high as possible. It still hurts. Even expected news can still be painful. I pull right up to the beach on the access road. I roll down the windows if it is warm enough. Fresh sea air is always good. I gather references while my significant being watches from the car. I listen to the water in the strait on the outside reef that is punctuated by the calls of seagulls sitting in the sandstone and planes overhead. The truth is that even if we had another fifty years of being together it would still not feel like long enough. We will just savour each other for as long as we can. The crushed shell-filled sand is ridged from the tides and marks easily with each waterproof hiker step. I breath long and deep before crouching low while pressing my knee into the damp seafloor for balance. A seal surfaces at the end of the reef. I pause to see if it sees me. Today, I feel like I belong here, even as a white woman of colonial ancestry. Then I rise and return the way I came, keeping the soft filtered autumn sunshine close to my heart.
The assurance of death is the one of the things critters have in common. Each passage of living is unique and can vary greatly but a last exhale is something we will all face. I came to begin this Seafloor and Seashell series with a quote from Etty Hillesum’s diary from Tuesday, 29 September 1942 ‘Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it towards others’ (p.535). Reclaiming ‘large areas of peace in ourselves’ - this is the underlying maintenance work that I do in my painting practice. Hopefully there is enough to ‘reflect it towards others’.
Key Findings:
This painting irritated me so much that I came extremely close to wiping it off the canvas board when I was done. Thankfully, I took a more cautious approach and stepped away from the easel. After a few hours I went and had a second look and decided it could stay. This didn’t mean I was particularly happy with it but it was breathing on its own.
Anything else:
I had hoped that it would have a long range on the mark making continuum. But it fell short. I think my own personal needs were greater than any exploration urge. I will try again.
Reference:
Hillesum, E. (2002). Etty the Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943. Translated by A.J. Pomerans. Grand Rapids, Mich. Eerdmans.
BETWEEN STORMS PAINTING
Reference Gathering:
The low winter light after heavy rains offers colours and pronounced shapes that I often overlook.
Making Process:
This painting came together in two different painting sessions. I stopped at the ‘blocked in’ stage, shown in the bottom left image, and left it for several days as I nursed us through a fall cold. The oil was dry to the touch when I began again and I softly built up the paint just enough to capture the spirit of the moment in all its gentle calm.
Finished Painting:
Making Notes:
Rain and wind has come through in unpredictable squalls over the past few weeks. However, in between has offered brilliant winter sun bringing unexpected colour and texture into focus in such a way that my brushes simply cannot resist. It is a combination of endurance and hopefulness that has me digging deep for both acceptance and resilience in equal measures. It is the kind of weather that flickers across our brow, registering deeply lined frowns that are then replaced by intermittent squinting grins. This intimate ‘landscape of the small’ brings us close to the seafloor at the tideline pulling our gaze above the slightly abstract shapes of seashells and out across the Salish Sea towards the mountains beyond. As the first viewer, I can feel my knees pressing into the shore with wisps of fragrant sea leaving sticky, damp, salty traces on my skin.
This morning I glanced at this wet painting before going to the kitchen to make coffee. After grinding the beans and tipping them into a pre-warmed thermos French coffee press, I poured boiling water over them and set it aside to brew. While I waited I went to my email and was curious about a headline in The Walrus magazine ‘What is missing in Margaret Atwood’s New Memoir’ by Amarah Hasham-Steele published on Tuesday, 4 November 2025. I had already decided a few days ago to order this book for my pleasure reading to celebrate the end of Unit 2 and I couldn’t imagine what might be missing from this literary memoir by such an accomplished writer. As I read the article, it becomes clear that Hasham-Steele is taking issue with how little of the ‘flesh and blood person’ behind her fiction that Atwood promised to share she found evidenced in this latest work. Hasham-Steele literary criticism is well argued but begs the question - how much personal dirt, even in our memoirs is enough to share in one’s creative life? Hasham-Steele successfully, using the theoretical literary framework of Oxford lecturer Catherine Brown, demonstrates by using examples from Atwood’s own fiction how there was more complex freedom in mining her life through fiction than the same events in her memoir. There is much discussion in the article about our body double(s) that takes risks in the writing that our flesh and blood person might be unwilling or unable to take. Hasham-Steele felt that the literary memoir missed the promised messing, rich, intriguing and insightful literary element within the facts Atwood presents in her 2025 Book of Lives.
This has me thinking — as a painter, do I have body double storytellers, narrators that are protective of my flesh and blood person? Is my imagined conversation with nature another aspect of or double for my inner self who can say more, present more, and be braver than my flesh and blood person could own up to on any given day? Is the painting itself a body double?
In answer, I do find my paintings to be a kind of body double that say things I have a hard time finding words to convey. Sometimes, the aspects expressed in a painting are only brought to my conscious attention after the painting is completed and I have had time to reflect on what is left behind on the surface. It is like having aspects of myself hidden in plain sight. I remember when my grandmother passed away. Months later I painted a portrait of an old woman. I was only fourteen years old at the time. My mother looked at the painting and asked who I had painted. I said it was just an old woman from my imagination. She didn’t say anything more but weeks later a family friend visited and my mom asked if I would be willing to show her my latest painting. I went and got the painting.
The friend gasped and exclaimed ‘that is such a great painting of your grandmother!’
I can still feel the tingling in my body from that moment as my conscious mind scrambled to catch up with who I had painted. I likely would have eventually made the connection but my conscious mind was being suitably protective of this loss of someone I was so close to at such a young age. From then on I understood that my paintings often share more than I am aware of at the time they are painted. These body doubles are often brave and bold engagers with paint on surfaces that lead to new conversations even as the first viewer.
This time the reparative elements in this painting’s subject and process were fully within my awareness. One of my favourite aunts passed away in early November just a few days before her 96th birthday. My grieving process has been a gentle detachment from someone who lived a full and meaningful life, mostly on her own terms right up until the end. The last time we had visited was on the phone during the summer and before that in person a year ago in October when I drove up to see my parents. During both visits we chatted about ordinary everyday things, family, current affairs and remembered times of shared appreciation. There was laughter between serious acknowledgments about circumstances and impermanence. It really wasn’t so much the words that were said but the pleasure of each other’s company that mattered. There were no body doubles for either of us in these exchanges but rather a deep relaxed vulnerable openness. I like to think that this painting holds some of this, without pretence or apology.
Key Findings:
The more I take the time for reflective and reflexive analysis with each painting, the more this process seems to build between the works as well as within the process itself. The stretching of brushmarks between figurative and abstract seem to be losing significance and a more natural easy flow has resumed again during the making process.
Reference:
Amarah Hasham-Steele (2025). What’s Missing in Margaret Atwood’s New Memoir. [online] The Walrus. Available at: https://thewalrus.ca/whats-missing-in-margaret-atwoods-new-memoir/ [Accessed 10 Nov. 2025].
NEW EXHIBITION
As mentioned, the fall studio tour came and went along with our fall colds that kept us from having people in the house during the tour. I admit to being disappointed but what is one to do? Again, a special thank you to those that came anyway to visit just the gallery pod! The group of new paintings shared in the previous issue are now released and in the new Terrill Welch Gallery Pod exhibition.
I am really pleased and excited about this new body of work. Do enjoy spending some time with it at the link below…
MY PERFECT WHITE CUBE IN THE WOODS - a Memorable Halloween Story
Darkness has almost fully settled in with a steady west coast rain for company. It is the eve of Halloween and the large group of preschoolers, whose parents make special arrangements with the neighbourhood in advance, have come and gone. At the frontgate, I had turned out the gallery lights and the porch light of the house behind. I was just making my way around in the house to turn out the lights on the side deck when I spotted movement on the road. There was a woman with two young children just about to the gate. I open the door and yell that I am coming and race back through the house, into my slip on my waterproof garden shoes and reach for the bowl of candies in one motion.
The children politely reached into the bowl as the mom explained that they had met the other group of tricker treaters and they had said that there were candies at our place. The older child, who is about four or five, then looks around and asks what was in the big black structure beside the gate. There are no street lights and no other houses close by so it is impossible to see what is inside. Both children are looking intently into the blackness for clues.
I reply ‘Oh, you haven’t been to the gallery pod before? Shall I turn on the lights so you can see?’
In the dimness I catch the silhouette of their affirmative nods and open the gallery door to turn on the lights.
The youngest child, who is only about 2.5 years old, was totally smitten. Her eyes widened and she proclaimed ‘cool!’
This is followed by ‘can I go inside?’
I reply that yes they can but she hesitates and asks again as if to confirm that it is truly okay to go into this brightly lit 10 metre square space filled with 21 Seafloor paintings with several displayed at floor level. I confirm again that yes she can go inside.
Stretching her short legs to reach each of the two steps to get in, the child enters the gallery pod with the confidence of a seasoned art collector.
She slowly looks around the room with sharp discerning eyes and then asserts ‘so cool!’
I replied with equal seriousness, ‘I am glad you like it. Feel free to come visit any time.’
The older child stayed with me by the door and the adult with the children stood just a little further back and allowed her children to enjoy this experience and engagement on their own terms. We grin at each other over the top of their heads as if in acknowledgment of how wonderful it is to have an unexpected adventure through the freshness of a child’s perspective… and believe me, getting to the gallery pod is an adventure!
I provide the map below on my website to assist visitors in finding this small gallery in the woods, that is curated in a repurposed shipping container.
I remembered this Halloween moment when listening to the recorded lecture ‘Making Public(s)’ by Adam Knight for week 21 in the Master’s of Fine Art programme. The whole concept of ‘making public’ and ‘making of publics’ is fascinating to me in this time of in person and online spaces and engagement.
The questions of - who is the ‘other’ for my work and how do I engage with them is almost a daily question for me as a primarily self-curated and represented artist.
The first exercise question is - who or what is public? My brain scrambles to sort through what is not public first and then reshapes what is left into various levels of public access. I do this as quickly as waves rolling in over the sandstone and then releasing in a notable swishing rush before returning again. It is not a constant contained static answer is it? As artists, curators and gallery owners and ‘the other’ we must ride these changing spaces with the skill of an experienced surfer, prompting such questions as ‘can I go inside?’
The next question in the first exercise is - when was the last time you made something public? This was easier to answer because the day before I had created and disseminated social media marketing posts for the Fall Studio Tour the coming weekend. It contained a gallery image with paintings, a map and list of participants in the tour. However, there had been a visitor to the house for another purpose that day who spotted a reproduction that I had already set up in my home studio for the upcoming tour.
She asked if it was okay if we changed roles from the purpose of the visit so that she could purchase it. This conscious navigation of what was a different reason to be in the space and the preparation of that same space for temporary use as a public space brings me to the second exercise in the lecture and thinking about the seven occasions of being part of a public, an audience, a participant, a user, a spectator, a consumer and part of data collection. My experience of these locations in time and space brings me back to the analogy of the waves rolling in over the sandstone. No two waves are ever the same yet there is a cumulative understanding of the rhythms and patterns that allow me to know when a tide is going in or out and when it is safe to walk on the sandstone that can be treacherously slippery at times or when it is warm enough to wade into the sea that is generally quite cool at this location on the Pacific Ocean. Navigating ‘making public’ and ‘making of publics’ holds this same cumulatively and shifting understanding for me. In the act of unconsciously or consciously doing ‘public’ it is shaped and reshaped in every instance using our cumulative understanding from past experiences. I suggest that we should more frequently ask and carefully answer the question ‘can I go inside?’ while surfing a rolling and dynamic ‘public’.
THE FINE ART AMERICA DECORATIVE PRINT AND PRODUCTS OPTION
I am working to get more paintings available for decorative prints in my Fine Art America shop over the next few weeks. There are various special savings coming up including:
November 22nd and November 23rd
-------------------------
Free Ground Shipping on All U.S. Orders
November 28th and December 1st
-------------------------
25% Off Wall Art (Canvas Prints, Framed Prints, Posters, Wood Prints, Metal Prints, Acrylic Prints, and Tapestries)
There will likely be more but these are the events that they have shared with me in advance so that I can pass them on to you.
Feel free to browse further in my Fine Art America shop at:
THE GROVE B&B BLOG FEATURE ABOUT TERRILL WELCH PAINTINGS
I have really enjoyed partnering with The Grove B&B (which is a fantastic place to stay if you come to visit the island) to provide a special experience for their guests. You can read more about it at the link below…
Marc S. Tremblay
UNTIL NEXT TIME
By the time you read this, I will have all of my assessment material submitted for Unit 2 (of 3 ) for my MA in Fine Art and will be unwinding after an extremely full six months. I am now going to have more physical time and mental space for visiting. I love slow easy visiting almost as much as I love standing with the sea. There is something about conversations where I remember what really matters to me in the gentleness of exchanges that can ripple with excitement and then recede into lulls of shared reflection. It is the kind of conversation that mostly happens between family and old friends but it can be between anyone who chooses to settle in to muse with another about something important to them. This is the kind of space I like to host here. A good visit!
I find in recent years, I must be more purposeful to engage and it seems to take extra energy to really listen between the clatter of distractions. Still, it is possible and I am grateful for each and every one of you who come by and add to my conversations and for each conversation you choose to host yourself.
For the Terrill Welch Gallery, I am taking my usual very low key approach to the coming holiday season. Feel free to browse and purchase original artwork or prints and other products as you wish but there is no pressure and I have no expectations. I always love to support your efforts to find the perfect artwork to added to your collection and I also want to support you in making an unhurried thoughtful decision. Think about it like a new puppy and deciding if you want to consider the stewardship of a new painting now or revisit the idea early in the new year. That said, if now is the time, I am ready whenever you are!
Have a lovely day and enjoy those unexpected pleasures of connecting in unique and interesting ways with fellow beings. 🤗❤️
Terrill 👩🎨🎨❤️
Member discussion