Elizabeth Hogg – My Lifelong Mentor

Pandemic life started for most people in 2020.  For me, lockdown started on July 7, 2017, the day my Mom passed away.  My grief paralyzed me. The days, months and years are a blur.  Six months after her death I was diagnosed with breast cancer.  Treatment began and was successful, even though I still struggle to regain my strength and stamina.  I am not sure whether grief or illness is more exhausting.  Yet I recently looked at my social media feeds and they show a different picture of me -all smiles- with my paintings and my students.  That is not an accurate portrayal of how I felt and as I pondered this, I knew I had to write and share.  I have hesitated to discuss my grief and my health struggles in public because I do not want people to feel sorry for me.  I am here to bring joy and not to bring people down.  But this is not the real, authentic person that I am right now. I still grieve, everyday, and I know that I am not the only one who is surviving life while carrying tremendous grief. 

During these past years, it has been my students that have kept my mind sharp and focused on art while, behind the scenes, I deeply grieved.  Teaching gave me time to pursue a new found passion for words. Through these words I have found healing as I reminisce about my life with Mom, and most importantly, I now get to share these memories.

As I write posts for this blog telling stories of my extraordinary mentors and how I began my career, I realized I have been on the artistic path since before I was born.  How could I not be a creative person when I have a name like Caprice?  I was born different and my Mom somehow knew that from the very beginning.

It was Mom who first taught me about color theory when I was a little girl.  She used to take me to work with her at Fanny’s Fabrics, the store that Mom and Dad owned.  While she bustled around merchandising and serving customers, she gave me the very important job of filling the thread racks.  I was focused on the task at hand, as my little fingers gently pressed on each thread color to find out if more was needed.  As I touched each color, something profound was ingrained in my head as I can still recall how the orange threads slowly transferred into corals and then into yellows; how the multitude of greens slowly morphed into blues and then purples and then reds.  I could not have asked for a more immersive experience in color.

As I got older, Mom taught me to be a custom seamstress. She was in actuality teaching me color, line, composition, shape and value; the five rules of fine art that I would study years later.  The sewing terminology was different from art but the rules were the same.  Seams (lines) had to be straight or I must rip it out and do it again.  If the fit (composition) wasn’t quite right, it had to come out and I would start over.  Mom was teaching me to have an eye, how to see.  I would not pick up a paintbrush until I was twenty-one years old but these years of sewing set a good foundation for my art career.

I studied with Karen Hersey and Keith Smith while living on the prairies of southern Alberta.  It was the perfect backdrop for learning to paint.  Then in 1997, on a beautiful, autumn day in September, Mom and I packed up everything we owned, including our dog and 3 cats and headed west to Kimberley, British Columbia.  We were starting over, just the two of us.  It had always been our dream to live in the mountains and we were doing it!  Life became a fairy tale as we found ourselves living in a ski town in a house built in the 1940’s nestled amongst the Rocky and Purcell Mountains.  As we dramatically renovated our little home, we simultaneously transformed our lives at the same time.