PERTH, ONT. —
Walking along a path she never imagined, Katherine Muir Miller discovered a new and happy version of herself at the end of it.
“It was really a difficult time of my life to get through, but I gave it a go and every single star lined up,” she said.
The stars have aligned for much of Muir Miller’s life from the moment she got married and became a mom. She had five children in six and a half years.
“We dove right in, diapered through the nineties, and raised five beautiful children.”
She nurtured an active life too, with fitness, competition, sport and coaching at its core.
“I was very active and worked out five days a week,” she said.
When the kids were older, Muir Miller went back to work as an emergency room nurse at the Queensway Carleton Hospital.
“So, I worked there for eight to nine years before I had an accident that took my nursing career away.”
It happened five years ago. Muir Miller had a harrowing fall from a height.
“And basically, did a face plant off a deck and broke the bones in my face.”
The injury would impact her balance, vision and memory.
“I ended up with some vestibular damage, visual damage, and neurocognitive damage. I had some restorative plastic surgery two years after accident, just basically scar revision. People who really know me might notice still, but if you’ve never met me before, you think I look fine and great.
But the accident would cost Muir Miller her career, and much of the active life she had always known.
“I thought I would be returning to work, but every reassessment proved otherwise. I had been quite symptomatic for three to four years and learned about a year ago that my nursing career was over, based on some of the damage cognitively,” she said.
“And it wasn’t just losing my nursing career, it was all of my sports—running, skating, skiing, never mind, walking. I felt like I had a lot of losses. I felt like I was sad a lot; I felt like I couldn’t take one more thing happening to me.”
Months after her trauma, Muir Miller pulled out a canvas and decided to paint—something she had only dabbled in years before.
“I painted for six hours straight without even realizing six hours had gone by. I stepped back, and I realized I hadn’t even had any symptoms. No dizziness, no headaches. And from then on, I never even looked back,” said Muir Miller.
She learned from gifted painters by taking lessons and studying at art retreats. She began selling art in shows, and on a day trip to Perth with a friend, noticed a “for lease” sign in a store window.
“And my friend Barb says, ‘you should call and open a gallery’. And I thought who opens a gallery during COVID?”
Clearly, someone who’s meant to. The Katherine Muir Miller Gallery is now open on Gore Street in Perth.
Friends and supporters aren’t surprised by Muir Miller’s tenacity.
“She’s been fearless to take on things that she hasn’t been sure of,” said friend, Darlene Kelly. “There’s nothing she can’t achieve, so this is just the beginning.”
Muir Miller is excited by her life’s new direction.
“What’s the worst thing that can happen? You go bankrupt and close. What’s the best thing that happens? Well, you have people that come in and your new path is beginning.”
At the Katherine Muir Miller Gallery, ‘the path’ leads through a series of vibrant and colourful Canadian landscapes.
“One of the constant things people say is ‘wow, the colour’. And it just makes people smile.”
Every scene, on every canvas, is inspired by someone’s story, or serves a reminder of one.
“If I walked you through all these paintings, you would see they all have a story. If someone sees a piece and it connects to a memory, that’s the greatest pleasure,” the artist said.
Like the iconic pine trees in her paintings, Muir Miller is rooted in promise; standing tall and growing in ways she never imagined–enchanted by her new landscape.
“I only started calling myself and artist last year. I was still a nurse who was doing some art on the side. Now, I’m Katherine Muir Miller, an artist, and I used to be a nurse. Everything just feels right.”
Katherine Muir Miller Gallery 22 Gore St. East Perth, ON (613)201-6448
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
