“Prairie Wedding”

I completed this mixed media piece recently that hopefully will stay in the family for a while. Acrylic, gouache and collage on 12″x12″ gallery wrapped canvas.

It depicts my grandparents wedding on the Saskatchewan Prairies in 1929 (Wyatt Earp died that year, to put it in context!). Edward Canham and Dora Graham were both originally from England. Edward served in the Legion of Frontiersmen in the early 30’s and I believe I managed to find the cap badge for the actual battalion he was in. He wrote his autobiography later in life, with the aid of his daughter, my mother, and titled it “Around the World in 80 Years”, from which the text in this piece is taken. Detail image shown here in the comments, but for those of you on small screens here is the text:

“That summer I had sent for my future wife, Dora, to come out to Canada to stay with an aunt and uncle in Saskatchewan on the prairies for a holiday, and to get used to the life until we could make a date for the wedding. We were married on the 31st July 1929, at Dora’s uncle’s farmhouse. This was the first farmhouse wedding that had taken place for many years. We had left it late to get a parson from the town and one was sick and one couldn’t do it, and then the other said he was just off on his holidays but if we were willing, he would come out to the farm and marry us there. So Dora’s aunt and grandmother decorated the long dining room and we had a really nice wedding and all the neighbours came for miles around. We went off to Calgary for our honeymoon with plenty of tin cans and boots tied on the car that took us to the station nine miles away.”

And as a little bonus trivia for those that have read this far, one of Edward and Dora’s grandsons, Brian Canham, would later go on to form the very popular 80’s Australian music group Pseudo Echo! (still performing today).