Just A Gal From Glidden: Granny Smith turns 100, and she's still teaching me how to see

By Kate Winquist

There I was in Grade 12 with eight pieces of artwork done and one problem left.

Sculpture.

I had nothing.

The deadline was coming. My portfolio was due for the Visual Communications program at Medicine Hat College. Eight pieces were easy. The ninth stopped me cold.

So I went behind our garage.

Scrap wood. A few pieces of metal. A can of spray paint. No plan. Just a vague memory of something I'd seen before. I'm pretty sure some of it came from the wooden box of my grandfather's old truck, Old Betsy, beaten-down, rotted wood barely held together by a few strips of metal. One of our cats had kittens in it.

I built something out of nothing.

It wasn't going to end up in a gallery. But it was enough. It got me in.

That was 1987. Two years after Granny's last class.

At the time, I didn't connect that moment to anything bigger. It just felt like solving a problem.

Looking back, I know exactly where it came from.

Eleanor Smith. Granny, to anyone who passed through her art room.

She turns 100 this week, and like a lot of students who passed through KCS in the 1970s and 1980s, I sat in her classroom without realizing what was being put in front of me.

Granny's last class. Eleanor "Granny" Smith, front left, with her Grade 10 art students and Saskatoon sculptor Bill Epp, front right, during a field trip to the University of Saskatchewan in the fall of 1984. It was Eleanor's last full year of teaching before she retired. I’m in the back row, white shirt, arm resting on the sculpture.

I was in her Grade 10 art class in 1984, her last full year before she retired. I'll be honest. I spent more time talking than working. My marks showed it.

But some things stuck.

I can still see the charcoal on my fingers, drawing apples and cattails in a vase. Over and over. At the time, it felt repetitive. Now I understand it was something else entirely.

She was teaching us how to look.

And then there was that field trip. Saskatoon. The University of Saskatchewan. A day with sculptor Bill Epp.

At the time, it was just a day out of school. That's me in the back, white shirt, arm resting on the sculpture. Granny down front in her glasses. Bill in the beard.

Years later, standing behind that garage, it came back.

That's how influence works. It doesn't always show up when it's handed to you. Sometimes it sits there quietly until you need it.

Granny didn't just teach art.

She showed us the world.

Slide by slide, she took us far beyond west-central Saskatchewan. I still want to see the pyramids because of those classes.

Her life explains why she taught that way.

Born in 1926 in Aberdeen, Saskatchewan, she grew up through dust storms that turned the sky black and pushed dirt into every corner of a house. She taught in one-room schools, Grades 1 through 9, and kept taking classes every summer to keep learning.

She met her husband, Ove, after climbing into a car full of strangers to go to a dance. They built a life on a farm near D'Arcy.

Then she spent 18 years at Kindersley Composite.

Students called her Granny. Not because of her age. Because of who she was. Steady. Approachable. Someone you trusted.

After she retired, she kept going. She travelled with purpose. Studied every country before she went. Took notes. Built slide decks. Turned every trip into a lesson.

Even now, at 100, there's still a slide projector on her table.

Still organizing. Still learning.

So if you ever sat in her classroom and thought you were just drawing another apple, you weren't.

You were being taught how to see.

Caleb Village in Kindersley hosted a tea for Eleanor on Saturday, May 2. She still lives there. Still surrounded by the people whose lives she shaped.