Michael Kluckner // Montréal and Quebec, 2024 with a look back to 1997

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Montréal and Québec, 2024, with a look back to 1997

Michael Kluckner

I'd been to Montréal many times but never stayed in the Le Plateau-Mont Royal/Mile End neighbourhoods. The pencil sketchbook pages below, in a 13 x 21 cm Moleskine sketchbook, are a contrast with the watercolours I did in the 1990s when travelling and writing my book Canada A Journey of Discovery, published in 1998. My travel drawing kit has lightened and simplified. I used to carry a heavy case with an 11 x 18 inch bound sketchbook and paints/brushes/water; I was younger and more ambitious! Now I'm mostly interested in catching poses and expressions on people, with a little architecture and landscape thrown in occasionally. Searching for the perfect line.

(Above) My 1998 Canada book, and a spread from it of another part of Québec in the winter.

(Below) Le Plateau-Mont Royal and Mile End. A diverse and youthful population and the distinctive iron staircases connecting the sidewalk with upper-floor suites.
Open staircases = easy to kick snow off them in the winter.
Outside staircases = less constricted floor plans for the small suites.

(Above) The Mordecai Richler mural on Laurier Avenue west of St. Laurent Blvd. – his neighbourhood of St. Urbain's Horsemen and other stories.
Dominique Desbiens and Bruno Royère created it in 2016.

(Below) Sketches in the Montréal Botanical Garden

And on Saturday in Mile End, the ultra-Orthodox Hasids on the street after worshipping...

And below, a much more secular Jewishness: the wonderful Leonard Cohen mural on Rue Crescent in downtown/centre-ville.
Finished in 2017, a year after his death, it was created by a group of artists with the MU collective, specifically El Mac and Gene Pendon, using a photo by Cohen's daughter Lorca.

Thence we went to Île d'Orléans just downstream from Québec City to stay with friends Claude and Christine for a few days.

One of the highlights was a visit to the sugar bush of André Rousseau near Saint-Pétronille. He taps each of his 1,500 maple trees, moving the taps each year, and connects them with blue hoses to his shed. In early March, the sap rises and a wood fire slowly evaporates the liquid, reducing it by a factor of 40 to create maple syrup.

I painted around L'Île and in Québec in 1997 and on trips in 2001 and 2002...

By this stage we had a rented car and drove south into the Haute Beauce, a rural area dotted with small towns that, back in the '90s, seemed to me to exemplify the old Québec of habitants, farms, and fine churches on hills. In that almost three decades, most of the towns have changed: chain stores, gas stations and large colourful signs on their outskirts, few businesses still open on the main streets. In fact it was almost a copy of our experience in northern France in the autumn of 2023. Even the roadsides had been groomed so it was difficult to pull off to the side, and of course there was much more traffic. So I did no drawing as we continued through. These images from '97 are my touchstones...

A bit of old proud Québec in an antiquities shop...

Late in the afternoon we arrived in Sherbrooke – Lennoxville actually – home of Bishop's University. There was a notable number of international students in an area that still has an Anglo stamp on it ....

And over a few days we explored the pretty countryside and several towns ...

Below: snapshots with the cellphone from Lennoville/Sherbrooke, the first one of Bekkah's bakery on Queen Street, excellent for coffee and a treat.

The principal reason for going there was to look for evidence of my maternal grandparents, the Findlays. I found their grave in the Malvern Cemetery and then researched to confirm that he had been knocked down and killed by a bicycle on a dark night in October, 1942, at the age of 60. My grandmother lived to 1967. The flag is for their son, my uncle Earl whom I never met, buried beside them, who was in the RCAF during WWII.

And their former home nearby on Moulton Hill Road.

The only highlight of the City of Sherbrooke is its extraordinary collection of murals, of which these are a few....

... and a visit to its art museum, which had sets of rubber stamps to amuse children, which we found amusing too.

And finally, Montréal tenants and apparently Québecois generally renew their leases or move on Canada Day, July 1st. We returned on the 2nd of July to find the sidewalks cluttered with rubbish left behind, as they had been when we were there a week earlier. It's a version of the "Council pickup" in Australian towns, where people put all their unwanteds out and they get disposed of for free.