My little sister, Heather Spears—artist and poet.

She was born in Vancouver. I was thirteen, and had always longed for a little sister. My mother had died young, and it was some years before my dad remarried. The first child of their union was a boy—now a very dear brother. I can well remember the evening fourteen months later. I had just gone upstairs to bed when the phone rang. It was answered by my Aunt—a somewhat brusque woman—and then came the call from the foot of the stairs: “Well, you finally got your baby sister!”   Some years later I came home from school very ill, and went straight for a bath. My little sister sat outside the bathroom door, crying. What had happened to her after-school playmate? (It was scarlet fever, and she had to do without me for six long weeks.) Another incident—she was still a pre-schooler, and I at University. A boyfriend studying Psychology needed to give an I Q test to a child her age. He came in the afternoon, and started with Heather. Suppertime came, and the testing still went on. Finally he burst into the room. “She’s a genius!” he pronounced excitedly. We all chuckled.  But I wonder now if he knows how accurate he was.                                                                             Almost from babyhood, she loved to draw, and paint, and her talent did not go unnoticed. After University she obtained an Emily Carr Scholarship to go to Europe to study Art for two years. During that time she met and later married an artist who took her to Denmark, where he was to study pottery-- originally for two years. However; they stayed, living for many years on the idyllic Isle of Born Holm, where she raised three sons. Later, as single mother, she kept the larder full by painting, drawing, and teaching. She also wrote poetry. She was able to sell many oil portraits to the tourists who came to the Island in the summer. And she drew—sometimes-whole families. They began asking her to draw the baby, too. That was the beginning of a lifetime of drawing babies.   “I remember at first what trouble I had drawing those babies. I went to the great artists—but they could not draw babies at all! I knew I needed to study the structure of the little faces.” She was allowed permission to draw in the local hospital—“at night, when I was bothering no one, and no one bothered me. I began to model little heads. I studied the muscle structure behind the tiny features.” She became famous for her baby- drawings. Often she drew in the premature baby ward. That work became the basis for her coffee-table book “Drawings from the Newborn.” Over the years she has drawn different groups in motion, too—dancers, musicians, lecturers; she found a special joy in capturing movement. She has traveled to Israel and Palestine and at one time lived with the Palestinians when the first Intifada was underway. One of her books shows injured Palestinian children; beside each drawing is a printed message in the child’s own words. Never one to spare the reader, “Required Reading” describes the bullying and eventual drowning of a Victoria girl by her teenage peers.   As her children left home she began coming to Canada for some months each year. While in Canada, she teaches—drawing, sculpturing of the head, and gives Readings. In the Okanagan she has become well known for all of these. Now a revered Canadian poet, she has twice won the Pat Lowther Award, and the Governor–General’s Award for Poetry. Once a year the CBC has a phone-in show where listeners talk briefly about a chosen book –one read during the last year they wish to recommend.  Most were fiction; but as I listened, taking occasional notes, I suddenly shot to attention when I heard Heather’s name mentioned. The caller was recommending “Line by Line.” He talked about the drawings, “so lovingly portrayed,” of writers Heather had drawn at Readings. He explained that she had contacted them all, asking that they submit a poem to go with their picture, for the book she was creating. The only limitation was that they use the word “line” in some way in the poem.   In her introduction to the slim volume, Heather says: “Drawing Canadian poets in performance has always been my particular pleasure. It’s different from doing a formal portrait—the poet is there but not static—involved and moving with the poem in personal, intimate ways I can hone in on if I pay close enough attention.”   She continues to live and work in Denmark, but remains Canadian at heart.  To me, she is still the “baby sister” I welcomed so joyfully all those years ago.

 

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