An instructor at NSCAD University is elated and honoured to be a recipient of one of Canada’s highest distinctions for achievement in visual and media arts.
Last month it was announced Michael Fernandes would be receiving a 2020 Governor General Visual and Media Arts Award.
The youngest of 9 children, Fernandes was born in Trinidad and left school at the age of 14.
“I was going astray, according to [my mother]. I had nothing, I was doing nothing, I was just hanging out and getting into trouble,” he told NEWS 95.7’s The Sheldon MacLeod Show.
“When I stopped going to school, I started painting and drawing on my own … it was independent of anything,” Fernandes added. “I didn’t know there was such a thing as an artist.”
When he was 16, his father died suddenly and Fernandes’ mother sent him to live with his older brother, who was a monk in Montreal.
In the 1960s he enroled in art school at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
“I was not interested in regular school, but when I entered art school, it touched me in a different way,” Fernandes explained. “I got really excited about being there, felt the freedom and the community of friends and colleagues who were on the same page with different ideas, just going for something.”
“To me, that was unheard of. I never imagined there was just a place.”
Fernandes started teaching at NSCAD in 1973, and he tries to bring that same excitement to his students.
“This is the most engaged subject you could ever be with. There are no rules, no one to tell you what to do,” he said. “If you have ideas and you have the ambition to rise, nothing can stop you.”
Now living in East Dover, he said being an artist gives him the opportunity to make things, be creative and think on his feet, but it’s not always an easy life.
“Not many artists can live from their work,” he said. “I’m certainly not one of those.”
Fernandes has painted houses and done some carpentry and landscaping to help pay the bills, but being a part-time instructor at NSCAD has helped to give him more time and flexibility to pursue his work.
He said his experimental art isn’t defined by any one medium. When he has an idea, he picks the one that will best allow him to express it.
“The work is varied in materials … I have done paintings, but I also work with images, I work with photography, I work with three-dimensional, I build things,” he said.
Overall, Fernandes feels his art is about communicating and connecting with others.
His work will be on display at the Art Gallery of Alberta over the summer, along with seven other 2020 Governor General Visual and Media Arts Award recipients.
A formal ceremony will take place on July 3 in Edmonton, and along with the award, each will receive $25,000.
