Dawn Ostrem
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Sept 05/01) - Driving a maroon and grey van touched with rust, a northern Alberta artist has come further north to show her work.

Joan McNenly travelled the Mackenzie Highway from Hines Creek, Alta., with her timid black Lab Sheen curled up on couch cushions in the back.

Stacks of cards reprinted from original paintings and food, bedding and clothes were crammed into the vehicle.

McNenly has been sleeping in her van for a week, parked near a Yellowknife convenience store, her centre for bathroom and coffee breaks.

"I've become very good friends with them," she said about the workers there. "I don't make enough money to sleep in a hotel."

At 57, the divorced mother of four is trying to make a living out of selling picturesque scenes of land and skyscapes that live in her mind and are caught on canvas. She has reprinted them on cards.

Most are scenes of nature with a rustic Alberta flavour such as light filtering through a forest ceiling, dancing on its marshy floor. Or snow icing the tops of round hay bales in an early autumn, snow-skimmed field.

McNenly said she is trying to sell her cards to pay the bills and perhaps paints herself as the picture of a generic starving artist with a modern marketing spirit.

She has driven to Yellowknife to approach art galleries, stores and go door-to-door to promote her work.

"The odd person answers the door and tells me to get lost but I can handle that," she said with a cigarette dangling from her fingers and her binder of prints open in front of her at a picnic table.

Self-described as a person with little natural talent, McNenly said she is one who has learned her craft by sheer determination as a result of pure appreciation.

"Since I was a kid I felt it was something I had to do," she said. "I had no gift whatsoever."

After leaving school at Grade 8, McNenly worked in several factories in Ontario, even a macaroni and cheese one.

She moved west and had a family while she worked as a cook, chamber maid and for a long time in electronics.

From wires and frequencies she switched to oils and canvases and has been painting for 25 years.

"This last five years I have taken it more seriously because I am unemployed," she said. "People don't want to hire me, I'm too old."

McNenly thinks she will be in the city for perhaps another week, possibly stopping in Hay River on her way south.

"I came out here because I sold to everywhere where I live," she said. "But if it starts snowing here I'm gone."

McNenly can be contacted at (780) 618-1620.