Sheena Fraser McGoogan: Artist. Teacher. Amateur Genealogist. Wanderer. Born Feb. 7, 1947, in Montreal; died Aug. 4, 2024, in Kitchener, Ont., of mantle-cell cancer; aged 77.
Sheena Fraser McGoogan.Courtesy of family
During the pandemic, when the world switched to virtual meetings and we all needed backgrounds for Zoom calls, I chose a colourful painting of the Three Sisters Mountains near Canmore, Alta. This vibrant work never failed to captivate my colleagues. “Actually, my mother painted that,” I would say in response to the inevitable “oohs” and “ahhs.”
My mother, Sheena Fraser McGoogan, trained as an artist and art teacher at MacDonald College, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and University of British Columbia. As a young girl she had haunted the studio of her maternal grandfather, Albert Pattison, a commercial artist best-known for his Montreal cityscapes.
Born in Montreal to Frederick and Meada Fraser in 1947, Sheena grew up west of the city in Hudson, Que. In 1968, she went with some teacher friends to a pub in Deux Montagnes. Typically shy, Sheena surprised herself when she not only danced with a dark-haired stranger named Ken McGoogan – now an award-winning Canadian author of more than a dozen books – but gave him her phone number.
Sheena married Ken in Bradford, England, the following year. Driven by a shared love of adventure, they spent a summer working as fire lookouts in the Canadian Rockies. They lived in Toronto, Vancouver and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, teaching at the International School of Tanganyika. Sheena shot hundreds of photos as the couple visited every Canadian province and territory, as well as Britain, Ireland, France, Greece, Australia, Tasmania, Singapore, Malaysia, the Perhentian Islands, India and Sri Lanka. You name it, Sheena was ready to go.
She especially loved rambling around the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, where she traced her Fraser ancestry through the Battle of Culloden. She was thrilled to explore the Robbie Burns memorial in Mauchline designed by her paternal grandfather, architect William Fraser. He immigrated to Toronto, where he created several notable neo-classical buildings.
In Toronto, every time she passed the Lillian Massey Building opposite the Royal Ontario Museum, she would point and proudly say, “That’s my grandfather’s building. The plaque credits a man named Miller but he was just the owner of the firm. My grandfather designed the building while meeting regularly with Lillian Massey – and I have correspondence to prove it.”
In July, 1979, Sheena gave birth to her son Carlin. When the Montreal Star closed in September (Ken’s employer) the young family moved to Calgary. In Calgary, Sheena taught full time and raised two children (Keriann was born in 1981). She also continued painting and drawing.
In the summer, Sheena led her family on camping excursions in the family’s tent trailer, and in the winter they skied every week. Sheena wore a neon orange jacket – not because it was in style (it wasn’t), but because when Keriann and Carlin barrelled ahead of her on the slopes, she wanted them to be able to look back and know she was there for them.
When their children went off to university, Sheena and Ken moved east and lived for 20 years in the Beaches neighbourhood of Toronto. Having retired from teaching, Sheena set up a proper art studio – a “she-shed,” as she called it – and the art exploded out of her. She mounted one-woman shows at different galleries, filling them with bold, vivid works celebrating the places she visited.
Beyond art, Sheena had what she believed to be a unique talent – yodelling. Her younger siblings recall (perhaps not fondly) her incessant practising of a limited repertoire of songs: The Lonely Goatherd and I Miss My Swiss. Much to the chagrin of Ken, Carlin and Keriann, Sheena continued her yodelling practice into her senior years.
Ultimately, Sheena and Ken relocated to Guelph, where they lived near Keriann and her husband, Travis. They took turns hosting weekly movie nights. Diagnosed with an insidious mantle-cell lymphoma, Sheena refused to despair but travelled and painted and fought hard to the end. She was with family when she died.
Keriann McGoogan is Sheena McGoogan’s daughter.
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