(Published in Windsor Life Magazine)

Mary Celestino’s paintbrush captures the wild beauty of Canada’s southernmost islands

A simple trip to Pelee Island on an August day in 1990 changed Mary Celestino’s life.

Celestino, a visual artist, remembers it as a particularly hot day, with plenty of smog staining the Windsor air.

To escape the heat and bad air, she and her husband took a day trip to Pelee Island – the most southerly inhabited piece of land in Canada.

It was her first visit to the 14.5 X 5.6 kilometre island located in Lake Erie, 15 kilometres from Point Pelee National Park.

“I didn’t know what to expect,” she says.

When she got off the ferry and set foot on the island shore, she was instantly mesmerized.

“I suddenly noticed this tremendous change from the mainland to the island. The most remarkable thing I remember while stepping off that boat was the sound of silence,” she says.

After driving around the island and visiting many of its natural sites, Celestino knew she had found the place she wanted to call home.

“It was just one of those flash experiences … like a lighting bolt that struck me … I knew I had to change my life around after seeing Pelee Island,” she says.

Celestino, who was teaching visual arts at the University of Windsor at the time, decided it was time to take the plunge into doing what she loved most: creating art.

She felt compelled to paint the wilderness of the island, which she feared would soon vanish like so much of the natural landscape in Essex County.

 “Right on the spot, I decided I would give up teaching in order to pursue what I am all about … I am an artist and this beautiful world around me had to be painted,” she says. “This world I had seen was so new, so fresh, the wilderness was virtually unspoiled.”

And so the hunt for a cottage began. Only a few months after their initial visit, Celestino and her husband found a spot on the southeast shore of the island that caught their fancy.

“I wasn’t interested in the cottage. I saw the barn, and it just exuded studio to me. It was beset at, what I believe is the most southern point of Canada, overlooking the bay.”

What Celestino didn’t realize was that the cottage was located on a very rare ecosystem called an alvar.

It wasn’t until Celestino tried to create a vegetable garden, that she discovered something usual about the plot of land.

“When I tried to dig into earth, I was hitting rock everywhere.”

An alvar is a unique ecosystem of grasslands, savannas, and sparse vegetation growing in very shallow soil over flat limestone, or dolomite bedrock.

With the help of an area botanist, Celestino began to learn just how precious the Stone Road alvar really was. She learned that it was home to many rare species of plants, including three that aren’t found anywhere else in Canada.

Celestino, who had grown protective of the rare flora around her, began sketching and painting the alvar.

“When I step inside the middle of the alvar, it’s almost a savannah sea. It’s really beautiful to watch when the wind comes through, and the nodding onions wave with the … breeze,” she says.

But she didn’t save her palette exclusively for the alvar; she explored the entire island.

“I could drag my easel anywhere on the island and work, and just concentrate on my paintings,” she says.

Since her first year on the island, Celestino has created more than fifty oil paintings, and hundreds of pen and ink sketches of Pelee Island and the five surrounding islands.

Her landscape paintings capture the solitude of the artist and her connection to nature. People are never part of the scene.

“What I intend to do in my paintings is create the momentary poetic feeling one gets when there is no one around,” she says. “The moment you introduce a human being in the landscape, that takes away from the poetic feeling of the landscape.”

Although she paints all over the island, Celestino gravitates towards the shoreline waters.

“That’s what the islands are all about. There’s this connection with the primordial waters and our past. Through water we gained our life,” she says.

Recording the journey

In 1992 Celestino made a commitment to draw all the plants she came in contact with during her sketching trips on Pelee Island and the surrounding islands.

“I recall thinking: I wish I had a book in my hand (to identify the plants),” she says.

Little did she know, that she was in the process of creating one herself.

In the mid-nineties, after hearing about a proposed development on the island that would destroy some of the local habitat, Celestino joined the Essex County Field Naturalists, who were also interested in protecting the local environment.

She’s been a member of the group ever since, and this year she teamed up with the group to publish a 281-page field guide called Wildflowers of the Canadian Erie Islands, which features 420 of her pen and ink sketches.

No regrets

Although it took courage to give up a lucrative teaching position to become a full time artist, Celestino has no regrets.

“When you are making a split decision and you’ve got something comfortable on one side, and you’ve got the unknown on the other, you’re at the turning point of your life and you have to trust in your inner feelings,” she says.

With paintbrush in hand, and feet firmly planted on the island she loves, Celestino’s trust in her own gut feeling has given her more than she could ever have imagined.

“I’m one on one with the external forces of nature, as well as the internal forces of nature. It’s a very spiritual feeling … It’s very self fulfilling and self-knowing.”

Bio – Mary Celestino

M.F.A. (University of Windsor and Wayne State University)

Teaching Career

Wayne State University 1977-1988

Art Gallery of Windsor 1985-1986

University of Windsor 1984-1990

Paintings

University of Windsor law library

Art Gallery of Windsor

Artbank, Ottawa

Numerous private collections