Walking through Chapters last night my eye was caught by a book about the "painter and printmaker", David Blackwood. We saw an exhibition of his once, at the Marine Museum of the Great Lakes in Kingston. His work aims to express the soul and the hard life of Newfoundlanders. The seriousness of the intention is what sets certain artists apart from the merely mediocre, to my mind; Mr Blackwood said (in 1992):
To produce anything of lasting value requires a strong belief and love for what you do, and great patience. Establishing one's identity as a serious artist takes time, and then it requires fortitude to maintain that identity with any kind of integrity.
This attitude isn't confined to artists, either. I've been thinking about another couple of people whom we know personally who have that intensity of purpose in life. One of them is our friend David Mann, the man whose powers of persuasion originally brought Chris and me to Ottawa! (We've known him since 1985.) He has been in the news recently for having mentored a Jordanian PhD student who is working on an exciting new way of creating drinking water out of seawater. You can read more or watch a CTV clip about this by clicking here. The Globe and Mail featured the story on its technology pages as well.
Kathy Fox, who in 1996 tested Chris for his Private Pilot's Licence and nowadays gives him regular challenges at flying instrument approaches on the Flight Simulator at the flying club on Saturday mornings, is another person who gets things done. Chris had to introduce her before she initiated his ground school class this week into the mysteries of Air Traffic Control and in order to get his facts right he first looked up her credentials on the Internet, finding this page that sums up her impressive career.
No comments:
Post a Comment