Oil Sand Blufff

Jean Kadmon – Writer and Visual Artist

Jean Kadmon;s teen-age photographs were made with a large ordinary Kodak of the “thirties” with its great lens, and were printed in her own dark room with a sink. In fact, she won first prize in a photo contest in Edmonton Alberta where she lived. 

The prize photo of the oil sand bluff and pine trees was near Ft. McMurray, a trading post and the end of a railroad from Edmonton. The little town was also the sailing point when the ice was out, for canoes and paddle wheel trading ships idown the Athabaska, Slave, Mackenzie river system to the Arctic Sea. When WWII began, Jean Kadmon, who was twenty, became a typist on the Canol Project in the oil camp Norman Wells on the Mackenzie River. While hiking to a waterfall, her Kodak camera fell from her hands and tumbled off a cliff far down to a rushing stream. Afterwards she caught her experiences in notes and letters that later in Jerusalem were used in her first novel, "Mackenzie Breakup."

The recent oil paintings of a model - Nelly No. 7 and Nelly No. 8 – are made with wild coloring and lumpy surfaces specifically designed to show up well on a screen of today. However, in black and white printing, they are not wild but tone perfect. This might be expected of a painter who became alerted to visual art as a black and white photographer…..