Meet Sara Sniderhan, who has just celebrated her six-month mark living in the Creemore area.
Sniderhan is a figurative oil painter who was largely self-taught until she travelled to Los Angeles and San Diego to take painting workshops with her “superheros,” including classical realist Jeremy Lipking.
“The big guys say it takes 10 years of concentrated effort to oil paint and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration,” Sniderhan says. “Over the years, I have made it more my language.” For the past four years she has been represented by Ingram Gallery in Toronto.
Sniderhan, who lived in Toronto for 19 years, moved to the woods off Airport Road in Mulmur at the end of June with her husband, illustrator Peter Mitchell, and their two children, Jackson, 7 and Isobel, 5.
When the family isn’t at the property building their house and barn, you can find them in Creemore where Sara paints at Mill Street Studio, where Jackson and Isobel attend school, and where her mother, Bonnie Carey, lives.
Why did you move here?
Peter and I never wanted to raise kids in the city. Peter is from Muskoka. I know many people who are really creative who come from small places. There is something about a slower upbringing rooted in the natural world that leads to a healthy, grounded and imaginative human being.
Here, it’s a totally different pace, different from the constant cacophony of Toronto. It is the most beautiful area within one-and-a-half hours of Toronto.
The first time we drove through Creemore, we saw the art galleries, the arts festival, the Creemore Kitchen restaurant run by two gay guys, and we felt that Creemore was a bit more liberal-minded than some other small towns.
How does it feel to change environments?
It’s crazy! It’s as dramatic of a move as I’ve ever made in my life. I love this property – the hills, the huge open spaces – so that always feels good.
But it has been a tough transition for my kids. My son really missed his friends and his school in Toronto. It has been a difficult social transition for me, too, because we had such a strong community of parents at our old school. Like Jackson, I’ve forced myself outside my social comfort zone. We’re looking for that feeling of belonging.
What does living here let you do?
We are super into the idea of making lots of food during the growing season. We are planning to build a functioning barn with chickens, pigs and a summer kitchen to can vegetables and a place for making cheese.
We had a small vegetable garden in Toronto and here we’d like to have a massive one. Doing real work in the natural world as part of our daily existence is new and exciting to me. I’d love to get to the point where we are supplying ourselves with most of our food or trading for it.
How has it affected your work?
I recently put my farm in the background of a painting. I will always be a figure-based painter, but I can see the landscape coming in. Every corner I turn on my property I think, I have to get a girl to stand there.