Wedding Day

Blog 22

When I set up my yearly schedule of posts I always check for holidays or other special events to create blogs that have some reference to those days. June is usually a very busy month with graduations, year-end celebrations, Father's Day, the end of the school year, the beginning of the holiday season. and lots of weddings. Did you know that June and August are the most popular wedding day months? As I have neither painted a graduation event or a portrait of my father or grandfathers, I decided to write about my own wedding portrait, actually a double portrait of my husband and I.

When I came to Canada in the spring of 1995, I entered the country as a tourist. My husband had lived in Canada since he was 10 years old. When we met in Germany, he wanted me to come with him to Canada. We became engaged, I left my job and rented out my apartment to explore the country he was raving about. We took the time to drive all the way from Toronto to Vancouver and back, and visited the Muskoka area. When he was offered a job in Ottawa, we decided to get married to make it easier for me to become a landed immigrant.

The acrylic portrait I did in 1996 was from a photo taken on our wedding day in Mississauga when we were posing for pictures on our tandem bike. As you can see from the photo of the painting, our first wedding day was not in the summer but in the fall. We were married in a small civil service with just our immediate family. My sister was my maid of honour and a friend from university was my husband's best man.

In Germany, you have to get married during a civil ceremony at the local registry office to make the marriage legal. If the couple wishes to celebrate a religious wedding, they will have a second ceremony at church, usually the next day but sometimes even months later. More and more couples opt only for the civil ceremony that is usually held with a few close relatives and friends as witnesses. Instead of the church wedding they decide to have a big wedding party at a community hall or hotel.

As I wanted to have a wedding with my relatives and friends, we had a religious celebration the next year in June in our local church in Germany, followed by a reception at a hotel. It was a beautiful wedding, but I never got the chance to paint another wedding portrait.

Even though the wedding portrait I did was done in my early painting days and has a couple of shortcomings, it always brings back the memories and the joy I felt that day. It was done with lots of love and the best I could do at that time.

What is the moment in your life that you would have liked to have preserved in a painting? Do you have pictures of this precious moment? It would be wonderful if you would share this moment with me.