Twelve of Eric Metcalfe’s gouache paintings have recently been installed at his Dogwood Care Home. You are invited. I wasn’t able to join his many Western Front colleagues for the tea-party launch. But when his good friend Paul Mathieu invited me to accompany him on another tea-time visit to Eric on Friday we made a point of seeing the splendid display in the care home’s common room.
Eric doesn’t talk any more and is now dependant on a wheelchair, but he is safe and comfortable in his private room. It is decorated with pieces of his art, and I’m told he often has visitors. His family’s decision to donate a carefully selected group of his jazz-inspired gouaches means that the staff can now appreciate Eric’s Art career, here in BC.
During the months when he is not living in his delightful-sounding home in Tuscany, Paul makes a point of taking a thermos of tea and home-made goodies to Eric’s home for an hour or so, most weeks. He invites a friend of Eric to join him for conversation. It was so good to see Eric’s huge smile as he listened to us talking.
Thank you for including me in a visit to see Eric, Paul. We always find lots to talk about!
Later that evening I attended the NWCeramic Foundation-sponsored talk at Emily Carr U, given by Canadian Ceramic Symposium keynote speaker Jesse Birch. It was a great introduction to the big event at Shadbolt Centre the next day. I’ll share my experience of that in my next blog.
Eric gave me this painting in recognition of our years of working together, on the occasion of the Raiders’ show on Bowen Island in 2019.
This is a link to a blog I wrote in 2023 with more details about Paul and Eric.
https://www.gillianmcmillan.com/blog/2023/12/11/paul-eric/
