4870 Chute Lake Road, Summerhill

4870 Chute Lake Road, Summerhill - 36 x 60 - Acrylic on Canvas

The year is 2011. It’s a beautiful late spring Saturday morning in Kelowna and I met up with a group of ladies for a bachelorette wine tour. Everyone was dressed in black shirts and denim. I didn’t know most of these ladies very well but they seemed to have things figured out. They all had the grown up things I knew nothing about; husbands, kids, mortgages and talked of hunting and horse riding.

I was twenty four, recently single and knew very little about wine. In those days, I could barely navigate a corkscrew and drank bottles of $10 wine before I went to O’Flannigans to dance to live music with my friends.  I rarely left the downtown core and had never stepped foot on a winery. I knew nothing about the grapes or different types of wines, but had seen the movie Sideways and knew Pinot Noir was a red. As far as I was concerned, that’s where the fancy sophisticated people went and no part of me was fancy or sophisticated at that age.

We met at the Minstrel Cafe for brunch. Y’all remember The Minstrel on Lakeshore? With the beautiful back patio under the 150 year old Sycamore tree? They had incredible food and live music. We had a lovely brunch on the patio and then piled into an RV outfitted with snacks, cocktails and country music. Our first stop on the tour, Summerhill Winery followed by a West Kelowna winery circuit; Rollingdale, Beaumont, Quails Gate. It should be noted that Rollingdale and Beaumont were more my style and I definitely felt out of place at our last stop, Quails Gate, but that might have had more to do with the amount of Raspberry Stoli & Sprites used to simmer down my social anxiety, paired with the wine from the previous stops sloshing around in my body.

We drank and snacked around town in the RV, scream singing country songs and had a picnic at Beaumont winery. The evening finished early with pizza and a Passion Party. The minuscule details are fairly blurry but that’s what usually happens when you gather that much estrogen together with alcohol.

I have been on a few wine tours since then and what I love the most is the scenery. I love the drive from our bustling city out up in the beautiful valley. The winding roads and greenery everywhere. Each winery has its own vision and story. As a hobby gardener, I find the process in which crops are grown to be fascinating. 

Summerhill Winery is situated on 65 acres of land off Chute Lake Road. It is a certified organic winery that celebrates biodynamic farming and permaculture. Purchased in 1986, The Cipes family moved here from New York and brought with them grape clones from all over Europe; Champagne, Bordeaux, Reigngau and Mosel. They grow riesling, chardonnay, pinot noir and gewurstraminer without use of herbicides, pesticides or any chemical fertilizers. 

When researching this piece, I learned the foundation of biodynamic agriculture is to treat each farm as a unified and individual organism. It is a self nourishing system fostering holistic development, and interrelationship of soil, plants and animals. Permaculture is a sustainable design of land use where human settlements and agriculture systems imitate relationships and patterns found in nature. Looking around the property and seeing how harmoniously the dirt works with the flora and fauna to grow the grapes. Summerhill deliberately plants flowers and runs an apiary on site to help encourage the bee population to expand which in turn benefits the grapes. The mentality of the winery is there is no difference between a flower and a weed, both are incredibly essential for feeding our bee population. These practices are successful too. Summerhill has created a stable and productive system that not only utilizes “waste” as resources and increase productivity, their method yields fantastic crops and helps restore the environment. It allows humans to integrate the land with its inhabitants. Have you watched the documentary, Kiss The Ground? Woody Harrelson narrates it and it’s really enjoyable. It would be wicked if we could all farm with those practices, help improve the planet. 

When I was first approached to do this piece, Olivia and I had bounced some ideas off each other and I drafted up some sketches of beach scenes downtown. Olivia wanted something that reminded her of home and while the beach sketches I did were cool, she came back and suggested Summerhill Winery. I was thrilled at the idea of painting a large landscape painting and from a part of town I rarely explore. This canvas clocks in at 36 inches tall and 60 inches wide. I did some googling and discovered so many incredible goodies to paint on the Summerhill property. I learned about the hand hewn log house on the left side was built in 1897 on the on the traditional, unceded territory of the Sylix/Okanagan People along a year round spring and owned by Henry Mallam. There were few doctors in the area so the home became a hot spot for child birth and midwife duties. Next to the cabin is the Makwala Kekuli. This is a replica of the sacred earth house used by indigenous peoples for centuries on their winter home. An agreement was made between First Nations and Summerhill that the following rules be practiced with respect to the kekuli:

• No alcohol or drugs around on in the kekuli

• No ceremonies to be conducted without the permission of The Westbank First Nation

• No idle chatting in “the womb”, all who enter this space must acknowledge this sacredness of this space

I don’t have a tally into the number of hours I put into this piece, but an overview of the brushstrokes it’s definitely a lot. I started with an under painting of bright pinks, reds and yellows. I smeared the sunset and lake reflection layer by layer with my fingers, with a mixture of acrylics, retarder and GAC 100. I worked in gold paint and rose gold leaf into the reflections trying to capture the essence of a beautiful late summer Kelowna sunset. The small brush strokes for every tree in the mountains, and the grass and leaves in the vineyard was a transcendent process. At times I completely forgot it was winter time while I painted and definitely felt like I was wandering through the vineyard and hillside itself. 

I have to admit, when I first started creating local paintings three years ago, I never thought I would be painting large landcapes of the Kelowna area. Part of me felt like the Okanagan art scene was already full of local winery art and every gift shop in town was loaded with postcards, and canvas prints of vineyards, grape clusters and bottles in the lake. No offence to any of these artists, they do wonderful work; I just felt I had nothing to add to that conversation and had no interest in painting grape vines to fit into that mold. Much like how I felt years ago about wine when I embarked on my first wine tour. I’ve always been more interested in old houses, quirky yards and alleyways, which really isn’t fancy or sophisticated.. What I learned through this piece is that I love painting landscapes. I love our valley so much, the lake is stunning at every angle, with the way the mountains hug the shore. I love the hillside curves and the flow of the trees. Once I carved out the land for the winery itself, I treated it no differently than I would a house painting, only this time, the winery was the front yard. One giant front yard which was incredible to explore with the log house, the truck, the apiary, the wine barrel planters. Through this piece, I have found a way to do winery paintings in my own vibrant illustrative style and I think that keeps me out of the gift shop mold and allows me to take a step back and explore Kelowna with my paint brush, in a wide lens scale.
The songs selected for this piece are based on the handful of wine tours I’ve been on and remind me of summertime in the Okanagan. It also includes songs I was obsessed with over December 2020 to March 2021 while I disassociated myself from winter and pretended I was dancing in a vineyard with acrylic paint.

Playlist 

1. Dog Days Are Over - Florence and The Machine

2. Redneck Woman - Gretchen Wilson 

3. Bitter - Worn-Tin

4. Bad Kids - TTRRUUCES

5. Greenland - Vundabar

6. ily ( I love you baby) f. Emilee 

7. Snowqueen of Texas - Molly Burtch

8. Whole New Mess - Angel Olsen

9. Lupe Fiasco - Superstar

10. Chanel - Frank Ocean 

11. C.R.E.A.M - El Michels Affair 

12. Break my heart in 2 - Ancient Astronauts 

13. Wah Wah - George Harrison 

14. Go Where You Wanna Go - The Mamas & The Papas

15. From The Sun - Unknown Mortal Orchestra 

16. Chemtrails Over the Country Club - Lana Del Rey

17. Is This Love - Bob Marley 

18. Hang Loose - Alabama Shakes 

19. Heads or Tails - Shannon &  The Clams

20. Summertime - Girls

21. Embryonic Journey - Jefferson Airplane

22. Albatross - Fleetwood Mac

23. Itching Around -Shana Cleveland & The Sandcastles 

24. I Can’t Speak - La Luz

25. Believe - Amen Dunes 

26. Can’t Stop - Red Hot Chili Peppers

27. June - Wild Belle 

28. Red Neck Woman - Gretchen Wilson

29. Let Me Back In - Rilo Kiley 

30. Walcott - Vampire Weekend