Anne Newlands – författare

With Weaving Modernist Art: The Life and Work of Mariette Rousseau-Vermette, author Anne Newlands returns one of Canada’s most accomplished and respected visual artists to the public eye. Born into a large French-Canadian family in 1926, Mariette Rousseau embraced her passion for the creative arts at an early age. She studied art and weaving at l’École des beaux-arts in Quebec City and then worked at the California studio of groundbreaking American textile designer Dorothy Liebes. Back in Canada after an art-inspired trip to Europe, she and her husband, artist and ceramist Claude Vermette, joined the growing movement of young French-Canadian artists in their rejection of the conservatism of Maurice Duplessis’ mid-century Quebec. By the early 1960s, Rousseau-Vermette had forged collaborations with fellow artists, designers and architects with like ideas about public art. Over the next 40 years, she scaled the heights of her profession, weaving hundreds of radiant large-scale tapestries that complemented the cool interiors of modern architecture. She exhibited all over the world and earned prestigious commissions from the private and public sectors. An esteemed teacher at the Banff Centre, she also received the Order of Canada. Yet three years after Rousseau-Vermette’s death in 2006, Newlands discovered there wasn’t a single book that told her story as a pioneer of modernist tapestry and one of Canada’s most prolific and influential artist-weavers. For Newlands, writing a book about the Rousseau-Vermette became an abiding passion. Through access to the artist-weaver’s archive, wide-ranging research and interviews with family, colleagues and friends, the author has created a vivid introduction to a remarkable artist who paved the way for the generation of Canadian textile artists that followed.

'Some can be active to a great age but enjoy little,' observed the Canadian artist Emily Carr shortly before her death in 1945. 'I have lived.' The impressive scope of Carr's art and her unorthodox life are the subjects of this book. In a text that skilfully blends selections from Carr's own writings with illustrated commentary, Newlands creates a delightful look at one of Canada's best-known artists. This book will transport you to British Columbia, where Carr spent much of her life in a world of richly drawn First Nations villages and totems, dark haunting forests, wild beaches and vast skies. There, you will meet the unconventional woman - 'the little old lady on the edge of nowhere,' as she called herself - who helped define the face of Canadian art.