NOTL Gallery show to bring Trisha Romance up close to her biggest fans

Tanya Peterson had a mailing list of more than 4,000 addresses of collectors, friends and fans of her mother’s work before she began to send out invitations to a special gallery show. 

Over 200 responded and have been scheduled to visit Peterson and her husband Jordan Morrison’s Niagara Image Gallery between 2 and 6 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 14. There, they will have a chance to reconnect with well-known Niagara-on-the-Lake artist Trisha Romance a day before she receives the key to the town at a special ceremony at the NOTL Courthouse.

“It’s a thank you to Mom’s patrons for 40-plus years of support,” says Peterson. “We’ve had many shows like this over the years. We know a lot of people are coming to town for Sunday’s event so we wanted to give them something for Saturday too.”

Afternoon guests who responded to the invitation will have an hour-long time slot to peruse the gallery that day, while the location will be open to the general public from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. 

A visit to the Niagara Stone Road gallery shows the walls are already replete with several of Romance’s most iconic works. 

“We have some brand new releases that most people haven’t seen before on canvas,” says Peterson. “And we’re going to have a massive one of The Candlelight Stroll that took her almost a year to complete. It will be on the main display wall there, as well as some that go back to her early days as an artist in Hornby, Ontario.”

Much of Romance’s art defined Niagara-on-the-Lake through the 1980s and 1990s. Long before the wineries of NOTL became the main tourist draw visitors would flock to the town to peruse her gallery and experience the charm of NOTL captured in her watercolours. 

“The question I would get asked all the time by people was ‘Are those places real?’,” Romance tells The Local. “I would tell them “Yes, come to Niagara-on-the-Lake and you can visit them.”

And come to NOTL they did. 

“When we moved here I was just a baby,” says Peterson of the family’s relocation in 1983. “She told me that in a year she had to get a nanny because so many people were coming to the house to see her work. By the time I turned five, it had exploded. Busloads of people were coming. It was incredible.”

Romance remembers those days, too. 

“My studio was up on the third floor of the house back then,” Romance says. “As my work was becoming more popular I had deadlines. There were many nights when I crawled into bed at 4 a.m. because I wanted to spend time with the kids before they went to sleep.”

Romance gives her husband Gary Peterson much credit for her success as an artist. 

“I couldn’t sell my art,” says the Hamburg, New York native. “Not for the life of me. I kept all my work under my bed. Gary was the one who could see the whole picture. It takes someone like that to sell art.”

“Dad was a marketing guru with her work,” adds Peterson. “Mom was so creative, while Dad went on the road and hired people to represent her art. As an artist myself, I know those are two different worlds. When you are in a studio you don’t think about sales. Mom was able to focus totally on her creativity.”

Tanya, her brother Nathan and sister Whitney were often featured in her mother’s paintings. There were advantages and disadvantages to that, Tanya insists. 

“People thought they already knew me,” she laughs, “and they thought that our lives were perfect because the paintings showed this picture-perfect life. But we had our own trials that we faced growing up just like every person does. But now running the gallery today and seeing the paintings all the time, they  are like photographs, memories that will stay with me for a lifetime.”

All three of the Peterson children are creative. Nathan is renowned for his photography, while Tanya and Whitney are both creative artists, with Whitney, the youngest, also writing and recording her own music. 

Tanya’s art is much different than her mother’s. 

“I wouldn’t say I was influenced by her,” says Tanya. “She never purposely sat any of us down and taught us how to draw. Of course, though, she encouraged our creativity. She gave us the freedom to find our own way. That helped me get into the illustration program at Sheridan College 30 years after she went there.”

And she never rode on her famous mother’s coattails while attending her alma mater. In fact, most didn’t make the connection between ‘Peterson’ and ‘Romance’ because of the different last names. ‘Romance’, by the way, is Trisha’s real name, the one she was born with.

Peterson is proud of her mother and looking forward to seeing her interact with some of the biggest fans of her creations. Romance shares her daughter’s excitement. 

“Tanya told me there will be people I haven’t seen in many years,” says the 73-year-old. “There are going to be so many people here. It’s going to be like a reunion.”

The Niagara Image Gallery is located at 1627 Niagara Stone Rd.