ELAINE PEACOCK
On Art And Being: A Creative Retirement in the West End

by Ashima Shukla
(click images to enlarge)

**Elaine Peacock next to her gallery wall of Monet inspired art.** *(ASHIMA SHUKLA PHOTO)*

Ask Elaine Peacock what art means to her, and she doesn’t search for a grand theory. “Mostly, I get totally absorbed in it,” she tells me on a Tuesday afternoon at the Haro Park Centre. “I just enjoy it”. Looking into her curious eyes, I become cognizant of a gentle presence with which she shows up to life. Over the conversation, I realise, it is this presence from which flows her creative practice and animates her paintings with movement. I learn that, for Elaine, art allows her to just be.

**One of Elaine’s favourite and largest works, with acrylics on a canvas gifted by a friend.** *(ASHIMA SHUKLA PHOTO)*

BEGINNINGS IN NATURE …

Elaine was born in Calgary in 1928, the youngest of four children. Plants, trees, and the great outdoors are some of her earliest memories, thanks to a grandfather who worked as a superintendent for the parks in the city. At ten, she moved to Edmonton, where she began to sketch, “just as a pastime," she tells me. And although Elaine never formally trained as an artist, art never fully let her go.

Her adult life led her to teach in classrooms, develop a counselling practice, and later work with churches. Yet the impulse to create followed her quietly, and tugged at her sleeves in unexpected places: a mountain road overlooking the prairies in New Zealand where she lived and worked for the Christ Church, her living room on Sunday afternoons in Naramata with LPs stacked on a turntable and the afternoon light streaming in, walks with a friend admiring the giant trees in Stanley Park, and long conversations breathing in the salt sea air by the seawall. Moved by the magic of nature, she would pick up her pencils or bring out the paints and seek to capture the beauty around her.

ART THROUGH EXPERIMENTATION …

It was only after moving into Haro Park 13 years ago that art became a constant practice for her. She encountered art therapy there in the form of an open art room with lots of supplies. “I used to go down there three or four times a week,” she told me, “and volunteer to assist people, but also to paint”. Her counselling practice blended naturally into these sessions, as she would encourage people to simply begin. “Pick up a colour, and make a mark”, she would tell them. “Then perhaps add another colour, and another”. Eventually, she found, your inner thoughts and feelings take shape on the page.

She also recalls playing with ink blots: dropping the ink on the page, letting it flow uninterrupted, and then returning to it once it has dried to interpret the emerging shapes. Presence was key to her approach here too: allowing the medium to have its own agency and meeting it halfway.

When explaining her love for mixing colours, she tells me what an artist friend once told her, “draw what you see, not what you think you see”. “When you really look,” she confides in me, “you can even see the marvelous variation between blades of grass”.

Click on each image below to enjoy the slideshow of Elaine Peacock’s work.

Now her practice takes the form of weekly paint nights at the Centre, where residents gather to explore acrylics with new themes each week. Her creative influences vary widely, but Monet remains an all time favourite, as does Emily Carr. Recently, Elaine has reinterpreted a Frida Kahlo portrait. Another night, it was women dancing. Many of these paintings can be found adorning the walls at the centre.

This routine grounds her, especially at a time when global suffering feels overwhelming. Elaine speaks about the weight of today’s politics and the ongoing climate apocalypse with empathy and grief, but also hope. Her niece, she tells me, loves morning walks. “Immersed in nature, she finds the fear and the anguish slip away”. For Elaine, art and being in community creates a similar spaciousness. She lights up at the thought of Vancouver in the 70s and 80s, where people gathered in third-spaces to create. In a way, Wednesday painting nights at Haro Park is one such restorative place from where she sends positivity into the world.

At nearly eighty-eight, Elaine continues painting, experimenting, and welcoming the unexpected. As we finished our conversation, she showed me yet another creative experiment. With a pencil in each hand, she drew simultaneously, the lines forming a face with just a few strokes. Laughing at my surprise, she offered me this sketch, which now hangs on the wall of my bedroom. Signed by Elaine Peacock. It reminds me of the many lifelong artists who quietly live and create everyday in the West End.