A month before Christmas, a lost painting at Toronto Pearson Airport set off an unexpected chain of events involving technology, a well-known artist and a link to Niagara-on-the-Lake.
That link was Filomena Pisano, who runs Camelot Studio in Virgil and has lived in the town since 2018. What followed, she said, was a moment that highlighted the better side of humanity.
“For me, it was really about ‘Wow. What are the chances of this happening?'” said Pisano.
The story began years earlier with a major setback.
Pisano had always been creative. Before opening her art studio, she worked as an aesthetician and loved photography. As a child, she joked, she would spill her mom’s espresso on paper and try to draw.
Ten years ago, everything changed.
“I got hit in the head with a kayak,” she said.
She had been on a beach in the Collingwood area when a storm blew through and a kayak went “airborne,” striking her in the head.
She suffered a concussion and recovered at her sister’s home in Vaughan, where renovations left her without TV or Wi-Fi.
“I said to my mom, ‘You know what? I’m going to go to Michaels and I’m going to get a pencil and I’m going to get some paper and I’m going to sketch. I have to do something.’”
She later took classes and has now run her studio for five years.
While she was in hospital, two figures kept appearing in her dreams: Mary Magdalene and Frida Kahlo, the early 20th-century Mexican artist who turned to painting after a devastating bus accident — a biographical echo that stuck with Pisano.
She has long admired Kahlo’s work, admitting with a laugh that she is “a little obsessed.”
“I think I’m at painting number 19 of her,” she said.
“Spiritually, (I’m) very connected to her. And I can’t even give you a substantial reason why.”
One of those Kahlo portraits became the centre of the airport drama.
This summer, Pisano met her friend Ada Espinoza-Varas in person for the first time after connecting on Facebook during COVID-19.
Espinoza-Varas, who lives in Brampton and had previously bought Pisano’s original paintings, received a gift: one of 50 limited-edition prints of a Kahlo portrait, which were made in May after the original painting by Pisano was made in April.
In November, Espinoza-Varas passed the print to her longtime friend Clarise Morris of Burnaby, B.C., who was visiting.
On Nov. 25, after news broke that an original painting by Kahlo, El sueño (La cama), sold for $54.7 million at an auction, Pisano posted a photo of one of her own Kahlo works on Facebook. Espinoza-Varas replied to say the gifted print had gone missing at Pearson Airport as Morris travelled home the week before.
Everyone was “distraught,” said Pisano. Still, she stayed hopeful.
“I just have a feeling it’s going to come back,” she told Espinoza-Varas.
She updated her Facebook post, asking anyone who might find the print to return it.
While attending a play that day, she checked her phone at intermission. A message awaited her from Mara Busca, a Facebook friend who had seen the post. Busca told her she had asked a colleague at the airport, Orion Sulo, to look for the missing artwork.
He found it.
Morris later told Pisano she believed she had left the print in a Pearson washroom. Pisano doesn’t know who turned it in to the lost and found, but is grateful.
“I was shocked that somebody didn’t say, ‘I found this, I’m going to keep it,’” she said.
Sulo placed the painting in his locker, and Espinoza-Varas and Busca — who had never met — picked it up. Espinoza-Varas then sent it back to Morris, who filmed its arrival at her front door. Morris now plans to frame it.
Pisano said the speed of the recovery and the way people mobilized showed a positive side of both social media and human nature.
“It kind of restored my faith in humanity.”
