Description
Speaker Biographies:
Jo-Anne Parent is the daughter of Andrew Trudeau. She was raised on an outer island, one of the amazing thirty thousand islands of Georgian Bay. She says, “It was not your everyday way of life, and so very different from that of a young person living in a town setting. Although living on an Island had it challenges, she would not change a thing.”
Jo-Anne has two wonderful sons, a stepdaughter, and eight amazing grandchildren. She lives in Tiny Township ON with her partner of 32 years, and she currently works for the Metis Nation of Ontario.
John Hartman was born in 1950 in Midland Ontario and studied Fine Art at McMaster University. After leaving art school in 1974, Hartman lived with Andrew and Pat Trudeau at Manitou Marina on an outer island of Georgian Bay. This was Hartman’s finishing school.
Establishing his reputation with the exhibition Painting the Bay at the McMichael Canadian Collection in 1993, Hartman continued to experiment with works that combined figurative, narrative and landscape. He received national exposure with Big North, an exhibition that toured Canada between 1999 and 2002.
Hartman’s path of painting the intimate and intertwined relationship between people and place, took a turn in 2003. He began to paint aerial views of cities as living organisms, a series that produced Cities, an international touring exhibition from 2007-2009. From 2014 to 2020 Hartman painted a series of portraits of Canadian authors in the landscapes or cityscapes that they love. The resulting exhibition began its national tour at the McMichael Canadian Collection in March 2020.
