Kerry Ferris

When Kerry was sitting outside one late afternoon and looked up to the light frolicking in the leaves and the leaves rustling, sounding like a lake, she thought back to the biggest influence in her life: nature. It started before she was born, for when she arrived in London, ON (St. Joseph's Hospital) on September 15th, 1949, she started her life divided – between city and country. All summers, plus spring weekends and autumn weekends, she spent at Grand Bend – not the Grand Bend of today, but the undeveloped, magical place of trees, forest, rivers, wild beach, squirrels, flying squirrels, frogs, toads, snakes, birds, deer, giant snapping turtles, painted turtles, grasshoppers, and raccoons. A place of constant excitement, interest, and stimulation. Even when she came back to the city, her backyard had many worlds to her the wild, the garden, the trees to hang from. She brought home all kinds of creatures – toads, a dead bat her mother would not let her keep, birds, blood suckers, and many more things. Her next major influence was when, at ten, she went to school in England. Mr. Kingston, her teacher, wanted to keep her in England to write her 11 plus exams that streamed you into university. Her parents brought her home – if she had stayed in England, an academic route she would have followed. In London once more, where she hated the Canadian school system, she swallowed the creative life. Then, when getting her cinematography degree from Fanshawe College, she discovered photography – photographs could still images, and her painting style was formed. Her ideas come from work trips (her backyard, the river, looking out the window, walking down the street, sitting in contemplation). She always works on a body of work in a series. She learned to paint landscapes in Newfoundland by sitting down and breaking them into simple coloured shapes, then the shapes started coming to life in complicated lines, colours and little shapes – but without the simplicity of the large simple shapes, she would never have understood the land. She would do almost anything to get photographs for her paintings. When she and Alyosha were in Zimbabwe in a wild reserve, she was photographing elephants. Alyosha and Elisha children were walking behind. She kept getting closer and closer to the elephant, snapping photographs. She stepped over this invisible line and the elephant standing in a deep swamp became threatened and started to charge. "I told the children to get away and I walked slowly back step by step, till I stepped over the line and the elephant became still. If the elephant was not in the middle of this deep swamp, there might have been a different outcome." About twenty years ago, Kerry decided to spend the rest of her life painting in Canada. She and her son often go on trips together and he now takes the risks walking where she can no longer manage, like balancing on a log over a giant snapper, while she is on shore encouraging him to go a little bit further. Now age is spreading her wings. Still, her favorite thing is sitting silently in the light watching, listening, and feeling her small but wild woods garden. Her windowscapes, being with her dogs and cats and traveling with her son. They both get excited by discovery. “'Submerge yourself in air and vanish,' a quote I wrote at 19 and a philosophy I live by" -Kerry