As a child, Lillian Laponen found making art an escape from her troubles. She remembers hiding in her room, drawing, away from the rest of the world, something she says brought her solace.
“I would spend hours in the bedroom drawing movie stars, horses and everything that I dreamt about and that I wanted,” she said. “I developed a hand-eye co-ordination which teachers started to notice.”
Soon enough, the young Loponen was winning prizes and contests for her art in her northern-Ontario town.
As she grew up and enrolled in nursing school, she wanted to study fine arts but says she is of the era where women became nurses, secretaries or teachers, and her parents encouraged her to go into one of those professions. Life got busier, but Lopenen always found solitary time in which to create.
“It was a quiet moment,” Loponen explained. “I could just lose all sense of what was around me and focus on what I loved to do and what I came to do.”
Now 78, Laponen ended up in the Yukon 45 years ago after bouncing around Canada for a little bit and having three children. Once here, she started to see that her art could be more than a hobby, as she entered exhibits and started selling her work, all while developing her skills and finding new inspiration.
“When we first arrived, it turned sixty below in Dawson, for three weeks,” Loponen said. “I took the pleasure of walking the dogs … with only my eyes peeking out. It was just so hushed, so cold and so foggy.
“The sunlight shone through as the rainbow colours. I was so taken with that, and tried really hard to replicate that sense of haunting quietness.”
Loponen’s art is now housed in permanent art collections such as the drawings and watercolours at the Royal Collection At Windsor Castle, U.K.; the Yukon Permanent Art Collection in the Canada Games Centre; the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre; the Keno City Mining Museum; and Crown Life.
In 2000, a Loponen image was included in an exhibition in Toronto that chronicled the history of Canadian watercolours from 1925 to 2000.
In Vancouver in 2016, Loponen was introduced to the prime minister, as well as to the Duke Duchess of Cambridge during their tour to Immigrant Services Society of British Columbia (ISSofBC). She was given the chance to talk about a watercolour piece of hers that was commissioned and gifted to ISSofBC.
When Loponen first sets out to create a piece, she says she has to have an idea that strikes her soul—something she can’t define in words, but can explore visually. It starts with a sketch, sometimes based on a photograph and sometimes from memory or imagination, before she gets to work executing her carefully-thought-out vision with her watercolour paints.
The artist recounts a strange incident on her first night in the Yukon that set the atmosphere for her. She had put her children to bed and was drifting off to sleep when the phone rang at around two in the morning. She picked it up and said hello, twice, before seeing that the phone was disconnected.
“Shivers still go up my back when I talk about it,” she said.
Discovering the nature and landscapes of the Yukon remains a cornerstone of Laponen’s artistic journey. She is particularly drawn to the colours created by natural light when it shines onto buildings, mountains and other surfaces, and she aims to show the serenity of the territory through her own work.
Through trial and error, she has learned to make use of her mistakes, rather than scrapping and giving up on a piece. These days, she’ll turn that unwanted blotch or bit of discolouration into something else.
“People started looking for ghosts in the paintings,” she said. “That was just me, making use of mistakes.”
Though her Yukon home has brought Laponen endless amounts of inspiration, it’s time for her to move on from the territory and closer to her family.
“After 45 years and at the age of 78, I want to go back and be near my family,” she said. “I was born in Longlac (Ontario), about 180 miles northeast of Thunder Bay, but I did my nursing training in Thunder Bay. My brother and sister and a whole bunch of Loponen cousins who I grew up with are there, and my son is in Toronto, so I’m accessible to him.”
Loponen says she now gets to see her family once a year and that she has had eventually moving back to Ontario on her mind, for a few years, increasing her visitation to test the waters. When her brother-in-law passed away in 2020, Loponen started to consider moving in with her sister, which she’ll now do.
“I’m really looking forward to it, but I’m sad to leave all my friends—artists friends, tai chi friends, writers group—I will miss all of them.”
In August, the Yukon Arts Centre (YAC) hosted a farewell exhibition of Loponen’s work, titled 45 Years of Northern Light. According to the YAC, the small, retrospective exhibit showcased “how Loponen masterfully captures the light, underscoring her deep connection to the northern landscape.”
“The show is a collection of big pieces that show some sense of the essence of the Yukon,” Laponen said recently. “If a person goes there, they will hopefully be given that sense of essence, of what the yukon means to me.”
While her time in the territory may be coming to a close, Loponen’s presence will remain in the Yukon through her art.
“I’m grateful to have those paintings left here,” she said. “It’s kind of my legacy of those forty-five years, making tribute to this time in the Yukon. I’m hoping they will be left here, but if not, that’s okay.”
