Book launch for playwright Eugene Sticklands The Innocence of Trees [Video]

Calgary playwright Eugene Stickland grew up in Saskatchewan, the same as painter Agnes Martin, but he didn’t know about her until 2004, the year she died, about 20 years after he’d left Regina to live and write plays in Toronto and then Calgary, where he was the Alberta Theatre Project’s playwright-in-residence 10 times.

“I was intrigued,” Stickland said in a recent Facebook posting, “as like me, she was a Saskatchewan-born artist.”

Martin was born in Macklin in 1912, moved with her family to Vancouver in 1919, then moved to the U.S. in 1931. She had over 85 solo shows, participated in the Venice Biennale and Documenta – big art star events – and was an undiagnosed schizophrenic until 1962.

In 1967, she left New York and after an 18-month road trip, settled in a rural community in New Mexico and lived there until her death in 2004, producing much memorable …