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It's not that Joan MacNeill doesn't like to talk about art. She clearly loves to visit galleries, to paint, and to encourage artistry in others. But to get her to talk about herself is tricky business. She strays all too willingly away from the topic of her own work to appreciative stories of her family, her students, and her teachers through the years.
Others will have to tell you about her own accomplishments: her watercolours that use the transparency of the medium and white space to transform ordinary garden flowers into luminescent forms, her beautiful acrylics from the 1980s that capture the real-life abstractions in the shifting sands of PEI's shorelines. Former students from her seventeen years as an art teacher at Westisle High School will tell you about her uncanny ability to draw out artistic talent and an interest in art among even the most resistant pupils.
Humility and generosity are part of Joan MacNeill's training. This past summer she celebrated her Jubilee year (50th anniversary) as a Roman Catholic nun among the Sisters of Saint Martha, an Island religious order named for a saint known for her service to others.
When pressed, Sister Joan credits her earliest artistic development to encouragement from creative parents ("Everyone in our house could draw," she says). She remembers being inspired later by art history classes taught by Father Adrien Arsenault. ("He lived it right out,"she says, "He lived it right out on the stage.") She also feels blessed to have had the opportunity to study art formally at St. Mary's College in Indiana-an experience that included six months study at the St. Mary's campus in Rome.
The themes in Sister Joan's work are not overtly religious, but she certainly sees her artwork as part of her vocation. "Some people say to me, `It's a wonder you don't do religious art,'" she says, "But I think if you're trying to save the environment and you try to do something in nature that people will like-well, then, it's bound to lift people's spirits."
Her conversation often turns to more spirit-crushing worries over the rate of development on the Island, especially the incursion of super-sized stores and the possible advent of resort development at Greenwich. The Greenwich dunes have been an important source of inspiration for her, part of the "peace and beauty" she finds in the PEI landscape. She calls the Greenwich dunes "the most beautiful in North America" and hopes her images will help preserve their untrammelled beauty.
Since her retirement five years ago from teaching, Sister Joan's most important contribution to her religious and geographical communities continues to be her artwork. At Mount St. Mary's, the main convent for the Sisters of St. Martha, her dune paintings warm the walls of the main meeting hall and her watercolours of old houses and flower gardens and driftwood grace the dining hall. When I spoke to her, she was finishing three new pieces for a show at the Ellens Creek Gallery, more paintings of what most "strikes" her in nature.
Her biggest challenge these days is "to get into something fresh." "If I was young and energetic," she confides, "I'd get into abstract." But with her ability to find the abstract line in the natural world and the spirit in the everyday object, few of her paintings' admirers would rush Sister Joan to change the way she serves her God and others through her art.