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SUTTON TOWNSHIP — Walk into Otto Ellmaurer's home and you'll be greeted by scores of smilling girls in calico dresses, most of them playing in water. They’re in the paintings on Ellmaurer’s walls and shelves, and Ellmaurer calls them his children. He’s already painted 41 or 42 in his series, but so far he won't sell any of them. “Would you sell your children?” asks the artist as chickadees feed on the seeds and suet outside his window. He says a friend in Toronto might end up using the paintings in some of the books she writes for children. For now, he says, he guards them jealously. “They brighten up my room.”

Ellmaurer, who was born in Germany 66 years ago, arrived in Canada in November, 1950, “in a fizzling rain storm.” His father had come to Canada 22 years earlier. As a young boy, Ellmaurer wanted to join him here, but his father insisted he first get an education.

Ellmaurer says he's been drawing since he could hold his mother’s lipstick. He did his studies in Germany as a draftsman. It's almost surprising his desire to come here never wavered. During the war, from 1939 to 1944, his father,  Otto Sr., was interned here — as where others of German descent, although their precise numbers aren’t known. Ellmaurer says that back in Germany it seemed normal that this could happen in time of war. He was determined to come to Canada “come hell or high water.”

His uncle, Tony, who owned a German restaurant on Drummond St. in Montreal, wasn’t interned. He, unlike his brother. Ellmaurer’s father, was a Canadian citizen. Tony convinced authorities to release Otto Sr. to live on his farm in the country. Tony had purchased the farm only a few months earlier in the area known as Glen Sutton.  He hired help to raise pigs and chickens, and the meat and eggs were used in the restaurant. Otto Sr, moved back to the city in 1950. That was the same year Canada lifted a ban on German immigration and the year that Otto Jr. came here.

Ellmaurer spent his first three years in Montreal living with his father, his father's sister, and two cousins in an apartment at the corner of Pine Ave. and Durocher St. About three years later, Ellmaurer and a cousin put their savngs together and bought a house in Dorval. He lived there for a dozen years before moving to the country.

For his first job in Canada. he helped out in his uncle's restaurant. Several months later, he was hired by an emploment agency which found him temporary jobs as an artist and draftsman with such companies as Canadair, General Electric and the CBC. He also worked freelance as a photographer. In 1965, he decided to give up the urban rat race and move to the country to live on “milk and cereal” so he went to live on his uncle’s farm. “I’m a nature boy. I had to get out of the city,” says Ellmaurer. He now lives in home he and his friends built on a piece of land he bought from his uncle.

Soon after the move to the countryside, he learned that the now-defunct Space Research Corp. had a plant nearby. He got himself a job there as artist. In 1980, Space Research Corp. was found guilty of illeqal arms exports to South Africa, and soon after, the company folded. Ellmaurer says some employees of Space Research cursed that happening. Not him. He sat down and painted the kind of scenes he liked to paint with no worries of having too little lime. It was like being let off a leash, Ellmaurer says. “For me, it was the best thing that ever happened.”