Marie Elyse St. George was born in 1929 in the Port Weller area of Southern Ontario, near the Welland Canal. She spent much of her early life in Southern Ontario, some time in art school in England, some fruitful artistic time in New Hampshire, and then moved to Saskatoon, where she’s lived since.

You may have seen her paintings – colourful, luscious, dense, mythic, often vicious pieces – on the covers of books by Lois Simmie and Anne Szumigalski, and on the cover of Grain magazine. She’s also had her own shows, of course, and on top of those visual art achievements, is a published poet, as well.

Those things being said, why an autobiography from Marie Elyse St. George?

The immediate answer is, Why not?

She had the idea, she sold Coteau Books on the idea, and here is the book itself, an amazing heavy tome, colourful and luscious to behold, and packed full of photographs from the artist’s past, some black and white reproductions of her drawings and paintings, and a section of glossy colour reproductions of her paintings.

Fine and good. But what makes the book a joy to read is St. George’s short, quirky, occasionally catty, entirely idiosyncratic nuggets of memoir. No there’s nothing altogether extraordinary about St. George’s life, but the way she tells what she has to work with is compelling and often funny.

Indeed by the time the book is finished, the reader would need a lot more information to complete a history of St. George and how she took to painting the way she did, how she developed her style, and where she is in today’s art world. But this isn’t a history, it’s an artist’s life, and this artist does the choosing. She also does the spelling, and she thanks Spell Check for its help, but it can’t do everything, so maybe the publisher can throw in a little assistance. Meanwhile, on with the memoir.

We can learn that her mother was French Catholic in Protestant Southern Ontario, a frightening place to be even now, let alone in the early century. She, too, had artistic leanings that were often sublimated into child-rearing, housekeeping, and orchard tending, and not always happily so. But what a colourful figure she cuts.

We hear that young Elyse, who was the called Elsie, but changed it, learned the first day of school “not to put (her) hand on the teacher’s bosom.” She was reaching for a beautiful pin, and everything went bad from there.

There’s a marvellously constructed chapter called Stealer where St. George recounts a lascivious uncle who preyed on his nieces and how young Elyse warned her mother of the man’s latest attempt on an older sister. Interspersed with the warning and the mother’s apprehending of the beast is a vivid description of the mother slaughtering a chicken. The metaphor is galvanizing.

We are also made party to the machinations of a teenaged Elyse overplaying the extent of her relationship with a married man so her parents will hit the panic button and send her off to England for a little distance. Well done. Now she’s exactly where she wants to be and from which she sends maddeningly enigmatic letters home about being an artist.

She’s low-key about her meeting, romance, and marriage with Bruce St. George, but it’s done very well, and then she brings us to the early seventies art scene in Saskatoon at the Shoestring Gallery and at the Mendel. She also pays homage to friends such as the aforementioned Szumigalski, Simmie, and to the poet Patrick Lane.

I’d call this a quirky, funny little book, if it weren’t so big. But the spirit is light, and the spirits informing it are many and varied.

Bill Robertson is a freelance writer.