Dear Prudence: An Homage to Canadian Painter Prudence Heward

There are certain paintings that stay with you. This is about an homage to Prudence Heward.

For me, one of those paintings is Rollande, painted in 1929 by Canadian artist Prudence Heward. You may know it: a young woman in an apron stands in front of a farmhouse, hands on her hips, her gaze meeting the viewer with an unmistakable sense of presence. It is a striking and memorable painting, and one that I have returned to in my mind for years.

Prudence Heward was a Canadian figure painter celebrated for her bold use of colour, sculptural forms, and psychologically charged depictions of women. Working during the interwar period, she was associated with the Beaver Hall Group, was a founding member of the Canadian Group of Painters, and exhibited alongside members of the Group of Seven. Influenced by European modernism, Heward challenged conventional ideas of feminine beauty and representation, painting Canadian women as complex, self-contained figures with strength and presence.

In Rollande, it is the colour that first grabs me.

The acid-pink apron burns against the green-gold field behind her. The woman’s direct stare, the atmospheric sky, the farmhouse and fence all create a tension that makes it difficult to simply glance at the painting and move on. The palette almost seems to vibrate. There is something simultaneously grounded and otherworldly about the figure, as though she belongs to the landscape but is also somehow separate from it.

I have been entranced by this painting for years. For a long time, I thought about creating an homage to Rollande. But an homage is not about simply recreating another artist’s painting. It is about allowing a work that has influenced you to enter your own visual language and become something new. It took me years to figure out what that might look like.

Homage to Prudence Heward: My answer is Dear Prudence.

In my version, I have painted a young blonde woman standing in a landscape inspired by Heward’s original. Her hair is being blown by the breeze and her eyes are closed, as though she is dreaming, imagining, or simply soaking up the moment. She wears a denim artist’s apron, covered in the inevitable evidence of making: paint splatters and marks from time spent in the studio. And then there is that acid pink. Rather than Heward’s pink apron, my figure wears an acid-pink T-shirt, a vivid flash of colour that vibrates against the green-gold landscape. Behind her, I have reimagined and abstracted elements of the landscape from Rollande, creating a visual conversation between Heward’s painting and my own.

But Dear Prudence is not really about recreating Rollande. It is about what it means to be an artist. It is about dreaming. About having an idea before you know exactly how to make it. About vision, imagination and the willingness to step into the unknown and create something that did not exist before. The title Dear Prudence has a double meaning. It is, of course, a nod to Prudence Heward. But it is also a reference to The Beatles song “Dear Prudence,” with its invitation to come outside, open your eyes and engage with the world. That idea resonated with me.

Artists can spend enormous amounts of time in the studio, absorbed in the work, chasing an idea, solving a painting, staring at a canvas until the rest of the world seems to disappear. Sometimes we need that solitude. But sometimes we also need to step outside, look around, breathe in the day and allow ourselves to play.

Dear Prudence became my reminder of that. Come out of the studio. Open your eyes. Look at the landscape. Dream a little. Then come back and paint it. In creating this work, I am not only paying tribute to Prudence Heward, but acknowledging the way another Canadian artist’s vision can travel through time and spark something new in another artist. Nearly a century after Rollande, I find myself standing in a landscape, looking at a woman with her eyes closed, dreaming.

Dear Prudence, won’t you come out to play? This is the story of my painting, Dear Prudence.