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Lillian Loponen’s goodbye exhibit

By Amy Kenny

After 45 years, artist Lillian Loponen is leaving the territory. To celebrate her work, she will have one final exhibit at the Yukon Arts Centre from August 1- 30. Mike Thomas photo.

As long as Lillian Loponen has lived in the Yukon, she’s been fascinated by the light here. It was one of the first things she painted when she arrived in Dawson City in 1979 and it’s one of the last things she’ll show before she leaves the territory this year to move home to northern Ontario, to be with family.

Lillian Loponen, Gentle Touch

Loponen is saying goodbye with an exhibition at the Yukon Arts Centre. From August 1 to 30, the Yukon Energy Community Gallery will host 45 Years of Northern Light, a retrospective of Loponen’s paintings.
 
Loponen has had dozens of exhibitions, including at YAC and Yukon Artists @ Work; she’s done the Ted Harrison Artist Retreat and the Jenni House Residency; she’s had work acquired by the Yukon Permanent Art Collection; and she has contributed a mural to the Beringia Centre.
 
Whether she’s working in watercolour or acrylic, what stands out in her landscapes is the quality of the light and the way it falls on trees, buildings, rivers, and flowers. Light (and the lack thereof, in some cases) has been an inspiration for her since the first few weeks she settled in Dawson City with her husband and three kids.  
 
It was winter when the family arrived, and Loponen remembers the temperature dropped to minus 60 degrees Celsuis for three weeks. With the kids in school and her husband at work, she spent her days bundled up against the cold, walking her dog around her new town.
 
“It was kind of haunting because everything was shrouded in this mist and it felt so far away from the rest of Canada,” she says. The light through the ice fog was haunting, a sensation that was amplified when the phone in her new house started ringing at 2 a.m. one day—even though the phone hadn’t yet been hooked up.

Whether she’s working in watercolour or acrylic, what stands out in her landscapes is the quality of the light and the way it falls on trees, buildings, rivers, and flowers.”

Lillian Loponen, Enchanted Woods

Two years later, when she moved to Whitehorse, she found she was still trying to paint the feeling of the light through that fog, and of that call through the dark. She hadn’t yet found anything in the territorial capital that moved her in the same way until she noticed the early morning light in Whitehorse that November. It quickly became the focus of her work, even as her work expanded beyond a strictly studio practice.
 
In 1985, Loponen started working as an instructor with the Artists in the Schools program. In that role, she taught painting at schools and at the Canada Games Centre, for kids, adults, and everyone in between.
 
One of her favourite things about that job was teaching younger kids, who she says came to art with an excitement she didn’t see in other age groups. By the time they get to high school, she says kids have ideas about what an artist is and is not. They tend to judge themselves too harshly to really have fun with art.
 
Younger kids show up with their explorer hats on, she says. They don’t apply the same pressure to themselves—they just enjoy the experience. 
 
Though she retired from that position, she says the arts community as a whole is something she’ll miss about her life in the Yukon (though she’s already been putting out feelers about how to get involved with the arts community in northern Ontario, as well as the writing and Tai Chi communities). She’s grateful to the galleries here, for the opportunities to show, and to the grants and residencies she’s received through the arts branch with the Yukon government.
 
She’s also excited though, to re-discover her home province, and what the land and light look like there.

The opening reception is Thursday, August 1, 5-7pm. Loponen will be in attendance. 

Every Friday, (Aug. 9, 16, 23 and 30) from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., Loponen will also have drop-in hours at the gallery so guests can say goodbye and speak with her about her work.