BANCROFT, ONT. — The opening scene of the documentary short Michal Manson: Portrait of an Artist shows Michal in her element: walking the trails of her Bancroft wilderness property, scrounging for interesting rocks to later incorporate into her artwork.

“I came because of the rocks but for the last 20 years I forgot why I was here,” she says of her reconnecting to the rocks that created the foundation for her work and her life.

The colourful and vibrant rocks of Canadian Shield had always been a draw for Michal, whether she was painting the hues of pink and black topped with dollops of snow, or photographing the dozens of rock cuts spotted while driving Ontario highways. It was the rocks that drew to the area her that also inspired the artist within.

This fascination with form, with colour and natural structures started many years ago, growing up in Severn Bridge, in Muskoka. Born one of two daughters, Michal’s parents ran a butcher shop and her mother liked to tell the story of how, at age four, Michal declared she would become an artist.

In 2004, Michal told a Record reporter her childhood had been filled with play and she’d spend hours sitting atop rock walls near her home, usually a book clutched in her hand and her mind and sometimes her fingers, creating illustrations of the stories she was reading. Those carefree childhood days were an incubator for what became a great artistic ability particularly because she had always felt an outcast in school, a shy and chubby girl with more imagination than social skills.

In 1978 Michal studied etching for a summer in Florence, Italy, and then attended the Ontario College of Art, but left before graduating after being injured in an automobile crash. From 1966 to 1969 Michal did part-time fine arts classes at what is now Concordia University in Montreal and in 1996 she received a Certificate of Recognition from the Canadian Art Therapy Association. She worked in art therapy at the Montreal Jewish General Hospital and later at the Thistletown School for Emotionally Disturbed Children.

Michal married in the 1960s, divorced young and thereafter had a number of long-term relationships but her friend Ira Ashcroft said that men always fell in love with Michal’s spirit, her independence but in the end they wanted her to become a traditional housewife. Michal was having none of it. She would remain single until her death, surrounded by admiring students and a select few close friends.

While still living in Toronto, Michal had begun exhibiting her work and was quite successful. Then during a visit to Waterloo, her life altered course.

Michal had been invited to join a panel discussion called “The Artist in Society,” hosted by Wilfrid Laurier University philosophy professor Robert Langren, who immediately offered her a job. She later told a Record reporter “So I came for lunch and I never left.”

A university news release dated Oct. 5, 1971, announced that Michal was joining the faculty of the new fine arts program as an artist-in-residence, earning the annual sum of $1,500. But Michal was never driven by financial success. She had found her calling as a teacher for a couple of thousand students over the next 33 years and she helped expand the department from scratch, eventually joining the faculty as professor of drawing and painting. Her passion as a teacher resulted in two major awards: Laurier’s Honorary Alumna Award in 1991, and the Hoffmann-Little Award in 2001 for teaching excellence.

Artist Marshall Ward was a psychology student when he met Michal. “I took a drawing course and it completely changed my life,” he said. “She was completely captivating as an instructor.” Ward had been a “below average” psychology student but under Michal’s influence, he switched to fine arts and excelled. “In every way she was somebody you looked to for guidance.”

Michal had the gift of inspiration, an ability to let students find, explore and enhance their gifts though she was also blunt and not to one to flatter if it wasn’t warranted.

For more than three decades, Michal taught fine arts, at first struggling to find exhibition space at the university. Marshall recalled how she would do everything herself: create an impromptu gallery space, hang the pieces and rustle up security. Throughout her teaching career her own work was also part of dozens of solo and group exhibitions and she received many commissions for portraits, posters, book illustrations and numerous other projects.

As she was retiring from the university in 2005, Michal reflected on her future and spoke of leaving her lively and colourful apartment in Waterloo to move to her hundred acre Bancroft property where she had been converting an heritage barn into a house. She mused to reporter “I’ve never had a plan in life — not one that worked the way I expected, anyway. I’m thinking I’ll just see what happens.”

What happened was that Michal immersed herself in helping cultivate an arts scene in Bancroft, establishing children’s art programs and supporting the Bancroft Art Gallery. She eventually sold the property and moved into town, finding the work of the barn and land too much. The woman who had brought so much colour and life to the world knew she was dying yet the barn had been her refuge, a place she escaped to from the city and where she could manipulate her surroundings to suit her taste. In the documentary she explained it’s what all artists do: turning the mundane into the extraordinary. And her barn was certainly extraordinary. Purchased decades ago for $600, she had the log barn dismantled and reassembled on the acreage where she spent all of her free time turning it into a fantastic artistic garden both inside and out, using mostly found objects including the bones of road kill. Michal was not the squeamish type and would simply boil off the flesh to reveal the sculptural bones beneath.

Her friends describe Michal as quiet, sometimes shy, loving, serious, generous and very private. There was one time in her life when her artistic passion vanished, shortly after many of her paintings were lost in a fire. That loss knocked her off kilter for several years but recently, she’d had returned to painting.

Her friend, French professor Ira Ashcroft recalled, “She knew what she wanted in her life.”

Donations in Michal Manson’s name can be sent to support the Art Gallery of Bancroft at 10 Flint Ave., POB 298, Bancroft, K0L 1C0.

vhill@therecord.com