After more than five decades as an artist, Monique Rainville is still learning.
Examples of her work can be found across Flin Flon, hanging on the walls of businesses, residences or the area schools where she has worked as an educational assistant and arts teacher for more than 30 years.
Born and raised in Flin Flon, Rainville was an artistic child who liked to doodle – sometimes even taking her talents to the walls of the family home.
Despite her proclivity for art, she didn’t have many options to refine her talents as a youth.
“I didn’t have any outlet here. There was really nothing,” recalls Rainville, now 58. “They didn’t have art in high school. I had art up until grade 9 and that was it. I was on my own, essentially, but my brothers and my sister, they would draw.”
After graduating from Hapnot Collegiate, Rainville went on to post-secondary studies for wildlife and fisheries at Lakeland College in Alberta.
She found her passion for art still shone, as she used her artistic skills in her lab reports. Rainville’s course work included doing plant and animal dissections, where she used her skills to create vivid, detailed drawings.
“I had a prof that really paid attention to my labs,” Rainville says. “He really liked my labs, my drawings. He said, ‘Maybe you should go into an art course.’”
Rainville took the advice and enrolled in a commercial art course at Assiniboine Community College in Brandon.
“I would say that I learned more in Brandon, the technical aspect,” she says. “Those were the kind of things I learned.”
Rainville had gained some tools to pursue an artistic career, but her motivation began to slip.
She later moved to Calgary and attended classes at the Alberta College of Art + Design, but was unable to finish her degree after running into financial issues. Rainville and her family moved back to Flin Flon in 1984.
Demands
Starting a new career with the Flin Flon School Division as an educational assistant was demanding. Then came further demands on her time.
“I worked to pay off my student loans, then I got pregnant and had kids and then I had to work,” Rainville says. “Once you have kids, honestly, it’s really, really hard to do any artwork. I did stuff with them, but nothing substantial. I had to put art on the shelf for a while until they got old enough.”
Rainville’s urge to create would not be dormant forever. She began to lead school art classes and run extracurricular art programs in addition to her day job.
Her school division colleagues took notice. In 1999, when the division approved a colourful new mural for the École McIsaac School library, then-principal Dean Grove knew exactly who to ask.
“That was the whole starting point of it again,” says Rainville. “My kids were older and I could leave them alone. I worked [on the mural] on the weekends there and it was good.”
Rainville set up scaffolding in the library to paint the mural, which depicts a series of animals high above the bookshelves.
“I would get to the top and drop a brush and then have to climb all the way down,” she recalls. “When I first got up there, I thought, ‘Oh god, what am I doing up there? This is crazy.’”
After completing the mural, Rainville brought her mother, who was in poor health at the time, to see it. She was astonished.
“It was so cool that she came in,” says Rainville. “I had the scaffolding on the side and I climbed up the scaffolding and she’s going, ‘Oh my god.’ She said, ‘I can’t believe you’re getting paid to paint on the walls now.’”
It was clear to Rainville that her passion to create, to express herself visually, was back – and now she had more time to explore it.
Since the library mural, she has created dozens of other works, including black-and-white drawings, coloured pencil drawings and, most recently, paintings.
Her work is well known across Flin Flon, where she is a founding – and very active – member of the NorVA Centre art gallery.
“I probably wouldn’t be painting if it wasn’t for NorVA,” says Rainville. “Before that, after I had kids, I didn’t do anything. I’d do a portrait here or there, a drawing and that was it. Once NorVA came, it could actually work.”
Like many in the field, Rainville draws inspiration from other artists. She has ventured to art galleries across Canada, including one in Vancouver that featured the works of her favourite artists.
“Emily Carr was my idol,” she notes. “The first time I saw one of her paintings, to actually see it in real life, it was the most amazing thing.”
For her latest project, Rainville looked not to Emily Carr, but to her hometown. Her latest series of paintings, entitled My Paper Route, depicts scenes of Flin Flon that are unlikely to appear on postcards but which are instantly recognizable to residents.
The various scenes, including back alleys and now-demolished buildings, were familiar aspects of Rainville’s paper route as a youth.
“It’s very nostalgic,” she says. “I grew up uptown, and seeing how things changed uptown, I was walking down a back alley looking for reflections, taking pictures, going up and down alleys.
“That was our middle class. Now, that’s almost all gone, but there’s still something there, that story is still there. There’s a lot of history and it’s disappearing. As Flin Flon shrinks and places like that age, there’s no one to revitalize them. But in a painting, you can do that.”
