{"id":11856,"date":"2020-02-07T20:52:11","date_gmt":"2020-02-07T20:52:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/?p=11856"},"modified":"2020-02-07T20:57:57","modified_gmt":"2020-02-07T20:57:57","slug":"a-tedious-apolitical-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/?p=11856","title":{"rendered":"A tedious apolitical story"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor’s Note: Because this is a long winded flabby factual story that few people with any smarts would be interested in starting let alone finish, we have decided to intersperse the text with random Court Painter images to delight the eye!<\/em><\/p>\n

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Court Painter has always faced several obstacles in defining himself to the art world. For one, he’s a thinly figured presence all too easily overshadowed by his arch nemesis\u00a0\u00a0CC (name available upon request), a hugely powerful art celebrity with economic clout, political friends in high places, an enormous industry scale PR thrust and high-quality picture making technology in the studio that he controls with his iphone from his hammock at home .<\/p>\n

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Then there is Court Painter’s history, which lacks the grand mythical arc of most other portraitists. And, more esoterically, there is the conundrum of his eccentric mid western Iowa drawl which to most people outside of Calgary, is almost impossible to distinguish from the typical mid western Prince Edward Island accent \u2013 to the point that so many foreign art enthusiasts confuse the two when attending local studio tours.<\/p>\n

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But despite some people\u2019s skepticism there is, in fact, a unique Court Painter way of speaking and despite its subtlety, it remains remarkably resilient. Over the last several decades, the increasing interconnectivity of the world has threatened a number of local artist dialects across the world, and according to an associate professor of linguistics at an unnamed university and the author of\u00a0The Studio Artist’s Local Language in Alberta\u00a0, the Court Painter’s accent is stubbornly persistent: \u201cCourt Painter’s linguistic identity is here to stay in the long term.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The primary reason for Court Painter’s\u2019 hard-to-identify accent is, of course, historical. Court Painter’s drawl was partly shaped by the early immigrants of Iowa, but it was affected much more by the arrival of about 45,000 coyotes that roamed the corn fields of Iowa.\u00a0 The result, especially in the Waterloo slums, was a drawl lightly shaped by Shakespearian English, but much more so by 18th Century colonial American English. Since Court Painter’s relatives were largely responsible for settling the mid Western US in the following decades, their Americanized drawl spread into Iowa and eventually became the de facto accent for the Court Painter who by the way has yet to provide his immigration papers to Canadian arts granting agencies.<\/p>\n

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For most non-native English speakers, distinguishing more generally between pig Latin and Court Painter’s accent is extremely difficult \u2013 many \u00a0compare it to telling the difference between two minor areas in southern Alberta \u2013 but linguists have isolated some distinctive qualities that are helpful. A feature of Court Painter’s speech called \u2018the Court Painter shift\u2019 involves something called a \u2018low-back merger,’ which describes Court Painter’s tendency to erase the difference between certain vowels that come from the lower part of the mouth \u2013 \u2018lot\u2019 and \u2018thought,’ for example. Court Painter pronounces the word \u2018moolah\u2019 in the same way that most Americans pronounce the word \u2018money\u2019 in the neighbouring state of Montana.<\/p>\n

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According to someone else, people casually trying to identify Court Painter’s accent, should focus two sounds. He does something called \u2018Court Painter Raising,’ meaning that he pronounces some two-part vowels (known as diphthongs) with a higher part of his mouth than people from other English-speaking regions of Alberta\u2013 this is what causes the \u2018ou\u2019 sounds in words like \u2018out\u2019 and \u2018about\u2019 to be pronounced something like \u2018o-oot\u2019 and \u2018a-butt\u2019.<\/p>\n

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The most telltale sound, according to a casual passerby, is Court Painter’s tendency to use the \u2018\u00e6\u2019 sound\u00a0in words like \u2018mantra\u2019 and \u2018pasta,’ unlike the lower (more \u2018oh\u2019-sounding) pronunciation favoured by his former corn belt neighbours . If someone says that, a busy body explained, it is almost impossible that they come from anywhere except out of the mouth and gold capped grill of Court Painter. The sound, we are told, \u201cmakes the people of the corn belt and Tim Horton servers, skin crawl\u201d.<\/p>\n

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This is all we know at this time!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Editor’s Note: Because this is a long winded flabby factual story that few people with any smarts would be interested in starting let alone finish, we have decided to intersperse the text with random Court Painter images to delight the eye! Court Painter has always faced several obstacles in defining himself to the art world. … Continue reading “A tedious apolitical story”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","hentry","category-images","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11856"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11856\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13685,"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11856\/revisions\/13685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}