Sandy Cove

About Sandy Cove

This folk art painting is by Nova Scotia’s Maud Lewis.

Maud Lewis is beloved for her simple, colourful and joyful paintings prized by fine art collectors the world over. She often painted what she saw from the window of her little house near the sea, recording the rolling landscape, the people, the farm houses, the animals, and the fishing boats.
This is a bucolic landscape of a seaside cove –fields in the foreground, houses dotting the coast, boats in the water and a view towards hills and a cloud-filled sky. It is painted in a palette of vivid colours—forest greens, earth tones, and turquoise punctuated by red, white and yellow.

“I imagine and paint from memory. I don’t copy much…just have to guess my work up.” Maud Lewis

“From time to time in the world of art, there emerges someone with extraordinary talent that sets them apart from their contemporaries and affords them a special place in the hearts of those who come in contact with the work. Maud Lewis was such an artist.” Lance Woolaver, Canadian author

Maud Lewis was born in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, in 1901. She was never formally trained as an artist, but as a young child used to paint Christmas cards with her mother. As an adult, she sold paintings from the house she shared with her husband for five dollars. Her happy paintings belied the hard, impoverished life she led, disfiguring birth defects and crippling arthritis that made it difficult to hold a paintbrush. Lewis died at age 69. The little one-room house was restored and is on permanent exhibit at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. Her artwork is held there and in the Canadian Museum of Civilization. Maud Lewis is the subject of several biographies and two National Film Board of Canada documentaries. In 2017, a biopic of Maud's life titled "Maudie" was released, starring Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke.