HALIFAX, N.S. — Oscar Wilde wrote in an 1889 essay that “life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”
So it’s fair to speculate that the great wit wouldn’t be surprised by the circumstances of Cape Breton artist Onni Nordman.
Nordman, an accomplished painter, is in the midst of a residency at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry outside Munich, Germany. After spending time with scientists doing virus research at the acclaimed institute, the quick-working artist has produced several series of paintings.
He started fresh work in early February before coronavirus had brought much of the world to a virtual standstill.
“The first drawing that I did was actually a picture of the coronavirus, looking like a movie star’s headshot, an 8-by-10 glossy, a glamour picture,” Nordman said Wednesday during a video interview.
“It had started to be on the news, it had begun to be talked about, but it just seemed like another discovery.”
That was then. With travel options increasingly shrinking and a still-valid invitation to stay in Germany for another residency, Nordman and his partner, Paula Muise, are torn between trying to get back to Sydney or living, at least for the time being, in relative comfort in an old villa in Munich.
“They lent me a studio to use while I’m here,” said Nordman.
“It’s the kitchen of the villa that they rarely use, except for spring and summertime soirees. It’s a 1919 kitchen.
“I’ve been working there. It’s a great place to work. Running water. Tables. It’s really nice.
“I don’t think they’re going to be having very many soirees, so as long as I can stay here I’ll be working pretty much unmolested.”
A painting in the Man in the Soup series by Onni Nordman.
In May 2019, a call came through the Canada Council about a special fund pegged to the Frankfurt Book Fair. Canada is to be guest of honour at the October event, if it takes place, and artists were offered the chance to get to Germany if they could land residencies or shows. Through a friendly contact, Nordman did.
“The Canada Council and Arts Nova Scotia both said no; they denied us any funding for this. But we decided this was too good an opportunity,” he said.
“‘Well, we’re not getting money from any funding source; we’ll go on our own dime.’
“It was because of a bunch of friends and our own initiative, really, that we got here, and then the world changed.”
The couple tries to parse whatever information they can gather from news sources but find themselves, like so many others far from home right now, in a tight spot regardless.
“We don’t consider ourselves travelling,” Muise said, differentiating their situation from that of tourists. “We’re embedded. We have living space.”
She said they have health insurance, albeit with a big deductible, and feel fine. For her, much hinges on an upcoming, separate residency for Nordman at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics that would last through mid-June.
“We can stay safe here for a period of time, but if that residency is cancelled by Plasma Physics, I personally don’t see any reason to stay here. I would go home, if I could.”
Compared with being quarantined in a cruise ship cabin, life in the villa sounds good. Non-essential shops were just closed Wednesday, but Nordman said the streets are wide where they are and there are plenty of parks.
“There’s no freaking out, though; people are real controlled around here,” he said.
A painting in the Virus & Bacteria series by Onni Nordman.
Getting to pick the brains of grounded scientists has been a dream come true for the artist.
“I brought 35 paintings that I made in Cape Breton and I’ve replaced them all with new work that I’ve done after talking with the research scientists and the doctors there,” said Nordman. “That’s why I came here; I came to learn straight from the horse’s mouth things about biochemistry and new physics.
“Science really is the best definition of reality that we have. . . . Science has a communication problem that art can go some way toward fixing or helping.”
Still, he wouldn’t mind being back in Cape Breton, under certain conditions. The couple has heard of panic-driven high prices for flights, and they are wary of the potential health risks of sitting in a plane.
“If we could teleport there, sure,” Nordman said.
Muise acknowledged feeling the COVID-19 anxiety that’s permeated society lately.
“It’s not easy being here now. We’re in a very lucky position, but it’s nerve-racking. Just like everybody else in the world, you don’t know, so it has been tense,” she said.
“Our little house, on the cliff, on the edge of Sydney harbour, is a very nice place to be isolated.”
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.
