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Suite 2, The Coal Shed,
402 William Street, Wiarton, Ontario

roguegoat@hotmail.ca

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Fen, swamp, bog, marsh, muskeg, mire slough, the language of the wetlands...I love them more than mountains. Two weeks ago Taryn & I went to Turtle Tracker orientation, a pilot program initiated by Bruce Peninsula National Park, in an effort to reduce traffic fatalities in reptiles & amphibians in the park. As part of a crew of citizen scientists we will be protecting nests during the nesting season (around now to mid June) and then helping hatchlings to water in hatching season late summer. It was pretty amazing to see how Taryn (the littlest TT of the group & a determined future scientist) absorbed the information, noting the different signs for snapping and painted turtle nests (snappers make a mess, painted turtles make a discreet divot) so well that he spied a painted turtle nest the very next day. He’s been keen on patrolling our local wetlands since, and the second photo shows why this kind of work is so necessary. The turtle & snake were within a metre of each other & will be two of a great slew of deaths on Ontario roads this spring and summer. The snapping turtle is already a species at risk...this year the painted turtle was recommended to be listed as such. Please watch for turtles during the next few weeks as they are drawn to the soft gravel at roadsides as ideal nesting material. Carrying a snow shovel on your car is a great way to move snapping turtles if they make you nervous! And if you see an injured turtle, please connect with the Ontario Turtle Conservation Centre. You would be amazed at how horrific looking injuries can be saved, and as a last resort, eggs can be harvested. Turtles must be 15-20 years old to reproduce and only 1 egg in 1400 survives...every death is exponential in loss. If you are drawn to the wetlands as we are, consider downloading the Ontario Reptile & Amphibian Atlas app @ontarionature. The app helps you easily identify Ontario’s reptiles & amphibians and is a citizen led database. By logging your sightings, you help build a network of information that then feeds various studies across Ontario working to protect these ever more threatened creatures. “Attention is the beginning of devotion” Mary Oliver

Thank you for all the commission requests! I’ll be responding to your emails later tonight. If you don’t hear from me, please ensure you sent it to the right email address. (Dot) com instead of .ca is a common mistake! This is the last commission cycle of this year. :)

After a day spent removing four feet of ancient manure, piles of rotting and unnecessary wood, tin & old tires, I arrived at the beginnings of a green house/potting Shed yesterday and thought about how like my mother I was in this moment. We infuse our children with ourselves, by design & happenstance, for better or worse. A childhood watching my mum tend and grow gardens passed on to me. An innate love of observation grew fascinated with her studiously kept journals documenting rotations, planting dates, the data of caretaking, the music of plant language, the common and latin. Today I watched our youngest wrestle with a world that still, tends to disregard the needs of the introvert as an aberration, a character flaw, a trait he shares with me, not his father. He had to have dental surgery after smashing his three front teeth and from start to finish, not once was it respected that he did not want to be cajoled, bribed or chatted to...he simply wanted to be left to conserve his energies to face a fearful situation. He did not want to talk about his favourite show. He wanted to sit quietly. He did not want a stuffie. He wanted to sit quietly. He did not want to talk in false, sing song-y voices. He wanted to sit quietly. This is not rudeness. This is survival. It is not impolite to quietly decline, to gently ask for space. It is impolite to disrespect that this is a vital need. Please someone, invent a coloured sticker that you can place on all medical files that says “Please do not talk unnecessarily to patient”. It’s as important as blood type, yet the majority, extroverts, seldom see why. Introverts are not necessarily shy...what can appear as shyness is not that we are tentative about participating because of self consciousness, but more so that we need to protect ourselves from being depleted by other people’s energy. We face challenge by shutting down exterior systems and going deeper into ourselves. If you ask us not to do this, you hamstring our strength. As a side note, when you have a child’s medical charts in your hand, how about giving them a glance and looking at gender before you insist on assuming that long hair equals femininity.

Real life is badly painting a patch on the wall to photograph artwork at the last minute, but also taking hours upon hours to decide on the perfect white. Real life is getting shit done with a five year old and a lamb in the studio, who alternate between attention distracting cuteness and dramatic physical expressions of ennui (photo 2). 😍😜

The is little Thomas Hardy, who’s mother did not want him. He shall always be “Thomas”, never “Tom”, although should he turn into a rakish thespian like Tom Hardy, we will adapt. He eats every four hours but unlike the human beasties I have attachment parented, successfully slept some hours in his “bassinet” beside my side of the bed. Also noted is that on night one of Josh’s return, his side of the bed was full of gravel due to small child & on night two, I was bottle feeding a lamb through the night. A lamb that he will have to feed every four hours when I leave on an adventure in a week or so, briefly in Hardy’s Sussex/Wessex and a lamb I adopted a short time after a stern “business” meeting about adhering to budgets and protecting time. #marriage

Josh is safely home from Edmonton & the mountains, both of which always reset his brain to positivity. The dance Taryn did when he saw the ferry carrying his daddy home to him was as pure an expression of happiness as the way One Eyed Mike wags his tail while he eats. 😍Thank you SO much to everyone who came by the booth and made it yet another crazy successful, sell out show (and thanks, as always, to the @signatures.ca family) Commission info is up on our website (link in profile) with some new changes to the process, which I’ll explain over the next few days. I’ll start responding to commission inquiries after May 15...for now...back to our studio routine, family time, and staring at my husband, who always seems extra handsome after he’s been away for a little while. 😜

Working with a material like wood means that each piece is, by virtue of its own characteristics, unique. It also means that there are many possibilities with it but only one shot, and sometimes I get torn between the options. With this wood, I saw both an earthy & pale blue scene, & then this bold & moody one. Bold & moody prevailed...as it has for all of my 44 years.😜 3 24x48 panels, spalted maple, patinated copper. $5200. This set didn’t quite make it to Edmonton, but can ship there to Butterdome (last day!) @signatures.ca clients for free. (Or elsewhere for applicable shipping charges). #handmadelive

We don’t always see where commissions land...thankful for when we do. A recent 30x60 Commission for a client that connected at the winter Butterdome show, big Leaf Maple, inspired by fall in Ya Ha Tinda, Alberta.Day two of Butterdome @signatures.ca Edmonton, you are always so good to us. 😍 #handmadelive

Josh will be opening the booth at Butterdome @signatures.ca shortly! This is a detail of a 24x36 piece. I’m really happy with the subtle evolution that happened in this collection. We purposely chose to make less of our signature long & skinny vertical pieces or horizontal landscapes so that we felt less pressure to make “enough” & reclaimed the freedom to simply respond to the wood and the paint. While everything is still identifiably Rogue Goat, it’s just a tiny bit looser (both roots & paint) with more subtle, layered details. #handmadelive

6 of 6. There is a segment of stage banter after “Come Pick me Up” on Live at Carnegie Hall, where Ryan Adams says “That’s it! Your’re sad now! Now you’re sad! Everybody’s sad now! YEAAAAHHH!!!!" This is that. I started seeing horse paintings in my minds eye about two months ago, but all wrong for Rogue Goat, where the wood takes the foreground and dictates the perspective. But here they are, modified. Running, unhindered by these thoughts but also made of them, because they are made of me. The question is not “How long did it take you to make this?” but rather, “How MUCH of you did it take?” I didn’t paint these horses consciously thinking any of this. I was not sad during its’ creation & I am not sad looking at it. In the trenches of a painting, the choices are technical, this colour or that, this passage, this movement. But as it flowed through, the silt of me carried with it. A paintings meaning is only valuable if you feel it, if it invites you & you accept. It can just be a pretty thing but if it asks & compels you to touch, to think, to feel, than that’s the magic. You are a participant in the magic. The light binds the dark, the land is vast and magnificent and the horses thunder across the ridge, infinitely free. There is pain and there is love and they can both be parts of beauty. 24x60/48x60/24x60 Hickory, patinated copper. $8800 plus tax, available. #handmadelive #cbcarts

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