by Susan Thompson

Gertrude Stein famously said “A rose is a rose is a rose”. Yet throughout human history flowers have been used not only to beautify our homes and lives, but as symbols and metaphors for everything from romance to femininity to the cycle of human existence itself.   These three floral photographers all emphasize the learning curve they followed to become better able to capture their own visions of the world with a camera. Just like the flowers they photograph, they are constantly seeking the light.

Klaus Peters

Tulip Petals

Klaus Peters first got into photography in 1993, taking photos for his wife Rika Peters, a painter. She needed something to use as subjects for her paintings, but Klaus found that he enjoyed taking the pictures for himself as well as for his wife. “From there it developed,” he explains, pun perhaps intended. “I started out with beauty. I see a scene, and say oh, that’s a picture, that’s something I want to capture.”

In 2003 Peters went digital, and his photography took off. “I think that the price of a photo in those days was about one dollar a photo. Now I was taking pictures left, right and centre and it didn’t cost me a thing. It freed me up to learn. I could take ten pictures instead of two pictures, and that learning curve really helped me.”

However, Peters still credits his wife’s artistic eye for helping him learn to compose a photo. “I was a carpenter by trade and everything had to be straight and level. I had to relearn what crooked meant. She taught me a lot about composition.”

“Flowers are my passion, and then comes birds. With the flowers, I go into macro, and then you can learn to take pictures that are out of focus, instead of the carpenter’s way.” Peters now spends each winter taking photos of flowers, such as a recent photo shoot of daffodils. “In the wintertime it’s an indoor sport.” However, he doesn’t limit himself only to flowers, making sure to capture images of everything from the birds at the feeder outside his window to the nesting blue herons he hopes to see this spring.

Peters’ work is regularly displayed at Picture Perfect in Grande Prairie, and most recently a dozen of his photos were also displayed at the Ovations Theatre.

Sharon Krushel

Wild Roses After Rain

Sharon Krushel is a floral photographer who, like Peters, began photography almost accidentally. Her first nature photography was for the purpose of Powerpoint backgrounds. She found that song lyrics were more visible on dark backgrounds, and started looking for images with a dark background but a few flowers catching sunlight.

The images came to symbolize something for Krushel, a meaning she continues to pursue in her photography. “There are certain images I find speak to me. I’m looking for images of hope, grace, survival, and perseverance.”

“Sometimes we get feeling trapped in a work situation or other environment where we feel that the artist in us is being paved over. I remember heading for the hills feeling extremely weighed down and depressed on a very dreary day in late May, when I came upon a tiny wild violet barely visible under a dump of snow. It was at the topmost point of my hike, and I had not brought my camera.

So I walked down through the snow, the slush, and the mud to get my Nikon, and I don’t even know how long I was on my belly on the ground photographing this little Johnny Jump Up smiling bravely at me from under that heavy, wet blanket. I went back the next day with my camera, and there it was open to the light, with only one drop of melted snow remaining on one petal.” For Krushel, it was a profound message, a sign in flower form.

“I seem to see life in pictures, but I so often couldn’t capture what I saw. A lot of times it would be specific lighting, but the photograph would turn out differently,” she explains.

Krushel now feels that her work has progressed to the point where she can capture the way she sees things, showing tiny pieces of light in the darkness.

Kim Scott

Untitiled

Kim Scott was recently invited by the Prairie Art Gallery to show the photos she has taken of the gallery restoration during the last six months. This exhibit will be her first public show since she left school. Scott studied photography after high school, and also took architectural photography for three years at university but eventually put photography on hold for two decades.

During that hiatus, Scott noticed her vision deteriorating. “Due to my perseverance in finding a doctor who took me seriously the brain tumor pushing against my optic nerve was removed. I noticed when it came back a second time, and had more surgery plus radiation. The radiation left me with some memory and attention troubles, but luckily, most of my vision came back.” This very literal change in Scott’s vision still affects her and her photographic works.

“Every day I am consciously aware of and thankful for my vision. I regained nearly normal eyesight after both surgeries. Because of the remaining double vision, I do need to turn my body more than my head to look left or right. And, I read with one eye closed, just like I take pictures. One eye is for close, the other for far away. Each eye sees colors a bit differently, so I have a choice.”

“It is so thrilling to learn different ways to photograph and process, and my favorite has been macro flowers. Macro photography shows us hidden landscapes, sometimes populated with their own now visible creatures.” Scott adds that flowers celebrate life, something she has also learned to do since her surgeries. Scott also finds that she has not only become fascinated with floral subjects, but the very light that illuminates them. “Light hides and light reveals. It is the glow of backlight, the texture of sidelight, and the strike of front light, the last of the light and the first, especially when I am up all night. Sunshine shows textures, shadows, and drama, while cloudy days reveal shape and form,” she says. “I follow the light.”

by Margaret Price

Bonebed

Behind her unrestrained veil of creativity, whether she’s working on an expansive, transparent watercolour mural of the local landscape for an area school, doing her own framing or churning out clay, kiln-fired pieces in her beautiful, 2,000 square foot “Canvas & Clay Art Studio” in the country, Suzanne Sandboe exudes qualities we associate less with leisurely, painterly artists and more with stock brokers and brain surgeons: ambitious, determined and always, always busy. “I need to have 48 hours in the day instead of 24 hours,” she jokes. “There aren’t enough hours to get everything done, but I always manage.”

But going beyond that veil, there’s another part of the artist that finds its way into her work. Sandboe also works part time as controller for her husband’s Grande Prairie based company. A bookkeeper by trade, she employs the same skills necessary to succeed in her part-time profession as she does in pursuing her passion: detail oriented, analytical, methodical, with meticulous eyes always open and searching for something. “I think the artist sees things differently than most people do,” she says.

Born and raised in the Peace Country, Sandboe, who traces her ancestry to both Norway and Czechoslovakia, fondly recalls a childhood growing up on her parents’ farm, deeply in tune with nature and the surrounding landscape. The yearning to begin creating art began at a very young age, and it came very naturally, as she was in lower grade school when she first realized that she could draw. Developing this talent over the years on her own, she began experimenting with different mediums and started painting with watercolours, enthralled by the immediacy of the medium. “I’ve always kind of wanted to try everything,’ she says. “I enjoy many different things so as a result I’ve kind of dipped my fingers in a lot of different pies and tried lots of different things over the years.”

In high school, a mentor gave Sandboe a set of oil paints and all the supplies needed, so she moved into painting with oils, an artistic form she would adhere to for several years to come. While she enjoyed this medium, she felt a strong desire to return to painting with watercolours, a yearning to return to the start after having benefited from years of experience. “Any art should be progressing, your work should be improving and changing, and you learn new things as you go along and you experiment and try new things,” she says. “As I look back on my career as an artist, things are much different now than they were 25 years ago when I first starting painting. Your style grows and you become a much more solid, well-rounded, confident artist and you become a sort of master at your medium.” And once she found her way back, things just took off from there. She began selling her work through Unique Gallery in Grande Prairie in 1989, making a name for herself in the area. From 2002 to 2006, her work could be found at the Front Gallery in Edmonton. “When you’ve been around and doing art for as long as I have, people get to know you, and I’ve been very well supported by the Peace Country,” she says.

Ideal light filtering onto Suzanne's old oak painting table

But perhaps the most remarkable thing about Sandboe is that she is primarily self-taught, citing love and passion as her impetus for creating. “I didn’t actually go to art school,” she says. “I’ve taken some workshops over the years, but my primary learning is through experimentation and what I’ve gathered from workshops and what I’ve gathered from doing things on my own. I know a lot of artists have this sort of philosophical story behind all of their work, and I’m sort of not that way. I don’t have a lot of ‘art speak’ when it comes to explaining what I do, I just do what I do because I love doing it. I enjoy creating, painting and drawing, I just don’t know if there’s much philosophy behind it.”

All modesty aside, Sandboe’s repertoire of workshops is actually quite impressive, including wheel throwing with Bibi Clements in 2000, pottery with Yasuo Tirada in 1999 and watercolours with Jim Adrain in 1990, the first watercolour workshop she ever took. To further her education, she participated in the Red Deer College Summer Series Art Program, where she gained additional instruction in watercolours and wheel throwing. In addition to being a student in several workshops, she has taught watercolour workshops in Grande Prairie, Beaverlodge and Sexsmith, and hopes to possibly begin teaching classes in her studio in the future. Her professional associations are extensive. She was accepted as a member of the Federation of Canadian Artists three years ago, joined the Alberta Society of Artists 12 years ago and joined the Peace Watercolour Society 27 years ago, where she has served on the executive board for over 18 years.

Needless to say, Sandboe isn’t exactly a novice in the Peace Country art world of massive scenes of the Western Canadian landscape, gorgeous mountain vistas and serene images of forests and rivers. “It’s about painting the local community and the people and the things that happen here,” she says. “As I grew up, we did a lot of fishing and camping, and so I enjoy the mountains, rivers and nature. It’s kind of a common thread that runs through my work, the countryside, the landscape and the history of people.”

Suzanne with a selection of her watercolours

Her ties to the local landscape can be best seen in a work she completed last year for the County of Grande Prairie’s Farm Family Award, entitled Four Up, Ace, King, Gypsy, Ginger –a striking, heartfelt work that belied her background as a young, headstrong farmer’s daughter. Another work derived from and reminiscent of her childhood is Saddle Hills Evening, a glowing, almost ethereal piece inspired by her time spent on her father’s and grandfather’s cattle grazing bush land up north in Saddle Hills. Soft beams of light stream through the forest, and a sense of nostalgia settles over the scene. “This piece is of the evening sun setting through the trees, and it’s just what it’s like up there, with all the poplars and aspen,” she says. “It’s beautiful, it’s very peaceful, and we spend a lot of time up there. Our family has always been very close but going back to the land has kept us close.” Angel Glacier Pond at Mt. Edith Cavell demonstrates Sandboe’s ability to convey emotion and a story in a painting. Roughly 12 years ago, she and a group of artist friends set off on a trip to Jasper to record the landscape, with easels and paint in tow. “The mountains are very near to my heart,” she says. “It was really cold out and we spent the whole day up there. The atmosphere was incredible, full of mist and clouds.”

But Sandboe, always the experimenter, wouldn’t be fulfilled just adhering to one subject matter. While she loves to paint landscape, she is particularly drawn to portraying historical items. Take, for instance, her work Outta Gas. While out taking a drive one day and looking for things to paint, Sandboe came across a group of old buildings that were most likely old country or hardware stores. Moved by the historical significance of the scene, she decided to record the moment. “I was driving along and spotted these amazing old buildings,” she says. “There was the shell of an old gas pump there, and it just struck me: they’re out of gas.”

Saddle Hills Evening

Despite the immediacy in her work, sometimes the process can take years in the making. Roughly 20 years ago, Sandboe traveled down to Pipestone Creek for a family reunion, where, unbeknownst to the artist, paleontologists would make a notable dinosaur fossil discovery. “I had gotten up really early one morning and gone down to the creek to do some sketching, about 6 a.m., and I remember it really well because it was kind of spooky and it was cool and damp, and no one was up at the campsite,” she says. “I went down there and spent the morning drawing and I walked away with several sketches in my sketchbooks.” Two sketches from this trip eventually made their way into finished works, one, entitled Bonebed, which Sandboe had the honor of presenting to Dan Aykroyd and his wife at last year’s inaugural ball for the fundraiser for the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum in Grande Prairie. The other painting, entitled Midnight Moon on Pipestone, was donated to the museum itself. Despite seeming like straightforward images of landscape, Sandboe’s talented hand draws the viewer in with striking visual elements and allows the viewer to see beyond the surface, becoming acquainted with and eventually knowing a deep, emotional realm.

Four Up, Ace, King, Gypsy, Ginger

When beginning the creative process, Sandboe often begins with a sketch, taking photographs as a backup, although she states that she believes that what you see and then transfer, pencil to paper, is not necessarily what stands out in a photograph, preferring instead to have a quick sketch of what it was that grabbed her in the first place. “I grew up in the country, so I’m always looking for things to paint,” she says. “I’m always paying attention to the environment and what’s around me.” Whether she’s going out with the sole intention of finding an object to paint, or if she just happens upon something fascinating and worthy of being recorded on canvas, she continually exists with eyes open. “What I paint is what I see,” she says. “I don’t just sit down and make up something, I like to see it, feel it or experience it, and that’s kind of what I do. I’ve got my eyes open and when I see things, I become enthused and it makes me want to create and paint. It just comes to me naturally.” The spontaneity in Sandboe’s work is palpable, and while many artists might overwork a landscape, not quite knowing when to stop adding elements to a work, she strikes a balance between composition and liveliness, her muted watercolours always convey a story, a feeling, an expression.

Midnight Moon on Pipestone Creek

Describing her style as “realistic yet painterly,” Sandboe’s broad artistic range allows her to be capable of doing a lot of different things, engendering a body of work that manages to stay fresh and interesting instead of becoming stale and stagnant. “In my work, I like there to be a lot of expression and I like to try and tell a story,” she says. “I want the viewer to get something out of the painting when he or she looks at it.”

As far as future plans go, Sandboe, always the busy artist, has a few shows coming up, including a show for the Federation of Canadian Artists and a group exhibition with the Peace Watercolour Society, as well as a list of commission work to complete. She hopes to do a solo show soon, most likely with a historical focus. “I’d like to do something about our heritage, our roots, where we come from,” she says. My grandparents came from the old country and arrived in Canada, so I think it would be interesting to explore how they landed, where they went and how they lived.”

For Sandboe, seeing is knowing, and knowing is essential to the creative process. “Someone once told me paint what you know and you’ll be a lot more successful at what you do,” she says. “And that’s exactly what I do.”

by Deb Guerrette

Weld vt. hammer or press (pieces of heated iron or steel) into one piece

Forge vt. shape (esp. metal) by heating in a fire and hammering

- Canadian Oxford Dictionary, Second Edition

Turning hot metal into art comes naturally for three Grande Prairie artists, whose work and play led them into it.

Greg Gourlay

West Wind, Greg Gourlay

With forging hammer in hand, Greg Gourlay strikes at an imaginary piece of hot metal, demonstrating how he would round or bend it using a homemade tool. A variety of metal rods, some with short curls, and others with elongated bends and twists, hang on a rack he’s fashioned beside a heavy metal work stand.

“You start with a piece of rod. Take what you need; heat it, add stuff on to it, bang it out, roll it, chase it around – this will be for another (coat rack) piece like in the house,” he says, now holding a long piece of twisted metal. Natural forms abound in the shapes Gourlay creates, in metal sculptures, in stacks of figure drawings he has done, and in wood and ceramic works. “I draw from life, pretty much,” said Gourlay, who retired this year, after 13 years of teaching high school art in Beaverlodge.

A recent metal rod sculpture is “based on a cycle of natural forms,” he says, showing the piece still in his basement. “It’s all forged, loosely based on lily pads, water life, fish and animals, insects, the natural world.”

Another piece, a small sculpture model in tin called ‘West Wind,’ “implies the winds blowing across the Nose Mountain, as seen from the highway to Beaverlodge.” Applying techniques he learned at an ornamental iron work course he took in England some years ago adds to the calibre and uniqueness of his metal work.

Gourlay grew-up in Cambridge, Ontario, where his father worked in a machine shop. He started down the same path as a youth working with his father, and then “came out west to be a teacher,” when he was 22.

Though he has yet to show his work formally, Gourlay’s long relationship with art and craftsmanship is intrinsic to his home and shop. The shop itself, in the back of his yard in Grande Prairie, is a carefully restored 1920’s vintage cabin from the Huallen area.

Cindy Nychka

Angel of a Fish, Cindy Nychka

An Open Air Garden of sculptures, birdhouses, figures and a seascape sits atop a roof at the QEII Hospital. In good view for pediatric and other patients, the ‘garden’ includes metal art pieces created by Cindy Nychka, a welding instructor at Grande Prairie Regional College. Completed in fall 2011, the three pieces made for the Open Air Garden are Nychka’s first commissioned project. Nychka’s created smaller metal art pieces at her leisure, but the commitment was a good motivator to complete a series of pieces, and she admits “it was pretty exciting getting that project done.”

Made of steel, stainless steel, brass and copper, the pieces include a pyramid, a tall circle-figured girl and a seascape of fish swimming in textured and twisty strands of metal weeds. To create a blister-pocked effect in the long weeds, the copper was exposed to salt and vinegar, and sealed in a container with ammonia. “It will turn green – it’s like it weathers it,” Nychka said.

Nychka grew up in the Beaverlodge area. She didn’t plan on a career as a welder, or a teacher at first either, but her creativity has been there all along. Introduced to welding by a family friend, Nychka worked in the oilfield to complete her journeyman ticket. She was taking a brief break from welding to do leatherwork, a craft she’s enjoyed for over 20 years, when a former instructor from Fairview sought her assistance. “I was just going to fill in for a short time,” said Nychka, in her office at GPRC, where she’s been an instructor for 10 years. Nychka has no shortage of ideas or desire to create. Largely self-taught in art, she enjoys courses in different mediums, such as stained glass, whenever she has time. “I have lots of stuff stored up, just like a volcano,” she says.

The opportunity to instruct a new Introduction to Metal Art course for GPRC this year is very exciting for her. “It means more time to work with metal,” she says, smiling. “I’ll have to prep for class.”

Lana Agar

Chair, Lana Agar

When Lana Agar has time to weld for the fun of it, art projects start to take shape from the bits and pieces of metal stashed in a special corner of her workplace shop. Agar is a journeyman welder, with a steady job in the oilfield and a plan underway to be dual-ticketed as pipefitter by the time she’s 30-years old, making time for art projects hard to find.

“If I have a spare day, if it’s ever slow, it’s, oh yay, it’s art day today!” Agar said, hanging back late at the shop one evening after a long day in the field. That’s when metal-shaped things not meant for the oilfield start to emerge from the back of Waydex Services shop in Grande Prairie industrial park; pieces like a crazy chair with arm and foot extensions, a coat rack with three sapling like shoots reaching tall, bent together at trunk and at top, or round-top gates with sail and scroll bent swirl shapes.

Agar works mostly with steel, but sometimes copper too, and while the welding brings a piece together, it’s “not just welding, but bending, twisting, a lot of grinding,” she says.
Sometimes teased by her workmates about what a piece is going to be before she gets time to finish it, Agar says she’s always been motivated to create, with most of her ideas derived from things she sees around her.

A large drying rack, complete with snow-capped mountains, tree, snowflake and cabin shapes, is one of her larger, fun and functional creations, now in good use by fellow sledders. Another piece, a long-legged ostrich-like bird with coiled bands of plumage atop its head, falls into a category Agar calls, “not meant to do anything, but turned out pretty cool.”

“I’ve always liked art, and grew up being very crafty,” says Agar, who moved from Keremeos, B.C. to the Peace region with a sister after high school.

by Eileen Coristine

The ninth annual Art of the Peace Symposium kicked off March 2 with the opening of the Art of the Peace Travelling Exhibition in the Centre for Creative Arts Gallery in Grande Prairie. Over the next two days, participants were inspired, encouraged and instructed by painter Carl White, carver Grant Berg and ceramicist KJ MacAlister.

Carl White decided early on that the legitimacy of art as a career called him to live that life fully. Not wanting to be a part-time artist he committed to a path he calls “I will choke until I swallow”. Not only does this path have him working as an artist fulltime, he also gives every aspect of his life the same focus and energy; all of it is art.

As well as creating masterful works, mainly through painting very large canvasses in oil, White spends as much time altering, obscuring and scratching poems onto them. Often he completes a piece by pouring or splashing paint onto a canvas that is five or six paintings deep.

Grant Berg, KJ MacAlister and Carl White

“I love it (art) but laugh at the folly of it too,” he said. “I am classically irreverent, I love it but I’m not attached to it.” Much more significant to White than his paintings themselves is the experience of making them. “A painting is the snakeskin that is left behind from the process of growth,” he says. And to him the point of doing art is to experiment and to challenge himself towards growth.

Grant Berg loves art and makes sure it is present in his life every single day. The Sexsmith stone-carver appreciates, creates and gives to the art community through his works and through his good works as chairman of the Prairie Art Gallery Board of Directors, board member of the Centre for Creative Arts and member of the Premier’s Council on Arts and Culture.

Berg’s love of art began as a teenager when a serious illness resulted in his staying in a hospital for an extended period. “The artworks in the hospital were a mental escape from the pain I was in,” he says “and those works still influence my carvings today.”

His admiration for artists Emily Carr and Lauren Harris is especially evident in Berg’s carved trees.

“The moment I started working with stone magic happened. Seeing inside the stone and seeing inside me,” says Berg. Inside of him are all the stories from his Cree and European family histories and memories of the good and bad experiences in his life. “I knew carving was going to be an adventure and I have documented my journey.”

“I live art fully,” says Berg. His early illness gave him a deep appreciation for life and he fills his days with skill and dedication, determined not to waste one minute of precious time.

“What I’d like to say to artists,” says Berg, “is draw from your own background, embrace your influences and turn the negatives in your life into positives in your art.”

KJ MacAlister has travelled to Japan where the people “immerse themselves in beauty every day” and claims that making that trip changed the way her brain works. Since her return she has had a new way of looking at her surroundings and her pottery.

KJ feels that texture gives each piece a life of its own. The texture comes from a variety of sources including the clay, the type of glaze and firing and the many found objects that she uses to enhance the surface. “Each bowl is its own journey, even physically,” she says. On their journey, her favorite pots have gone through wood-firing. That process of extreme heat and extreme unpredictability ensures that you “will never have the same pot come out of two different firings.”

The love of wood-firing inspired MacAlister to build a small kiln at Pipestone Creek, where she was raised. Her rural upbringing has been a strong influence in her work, both in form and in texture. “Spending my childhood with trees around me, why wouldn’t I make pots that look like bark when I grew up?” she asks. “I can be so immersed in the tactility of what I’m doing that it is almost a meditation.”

At present, MacAlister is employed offering technical support and instruction at Clayworks Studio-Link in Edmonton. Spending her days with clay and inspiring the people around her, she’s often captured by the natural things in our lives that can be used to make art.

Closing her presentation with questions MacAlister asked, “Would your experience change if drinking from a cup had a tactile experience with it? Would it be enhanced? Keep your eyes open for the texture in your world.”

Process: To Carl White it’s more important than the finished piece. Grant Berg describes it as creating visual poetry and KJ MacAlister says hers is meditative. But during my process I encounter my inner critic, that voice that says I suck, my ideas suck and that everybody gets this but me. Here are three suggestions I’ve tried for silencing (or at least temporarily gagging) the inner critic so you create some art (or at least get out your supplies).

1) Name your critic and make a visual representation of him/her.

When I was young, a jolly (if often inebriated) uncle lived at my house and was called Uncle Happy. In later years I did a caricature inspired by his memory. Once, another uncle came to visit. I’d just got into colouring and proudly showed him my latest crayon work. He told me it just looked like “a bunch of scribbling”.

Taking the suggestion above, I made a new piece with a frowning face and eyebrows like inverted teepees called Uncle Not So Happy and hung it in my studio. New advice says to remove the critic’s image during art making. In hopes that they will amuse themselves elsewhere and let one get on with it I suppose.

2) Speak to your inner critic in short angry sentences.

I said “Uncle Not So Happy leave me the &*$# alone!” “I need to process,” I shouted. I said so many short angry things that my husband ran in to find out what was wrong. Just what I needed, another critic.

Now I’m taking Uncle Not So Happy out of the room, having strong words with him and turning his face to the wall. If only the old &#*@ had just gently asked me about my process all those years ago.

3) My advice is to tell your inner critic “I make fine art. However it turns out, it’s fine with me.”

I hope you enjoy whatever you’re doing and find art in the process.

Al Gervais has been learning the principals of photography for a little over 8 years.  His learning has been self directed and not institutionalized.  He is inspired by innovation and strives to make what he does the best it can be.

He believes photography as art is experiencing continuous change which he thinks is fantastic.  He states, the roll of a photographer has historically been to  document or “report what they see”, but the world of digital media opens up all kinds of possibilities for a photographer to play and express their thoughts even further. “At a minimum, art (including photography), should provide viewers  with a break from the daily grind and allow them to at least momentarily unwind.  A loftier goal is to have the audience walk away better for the encounter, meaning anything from a refreshed state of mind to a better understanding of a subject or even a change in philosophy.” says Al.

When it comes to the subject of his photography versus the way the photograph is executed, Al feels a photographer needs to pay attention to both. He believes a great finished product requires a subject that has the potential to invoke a mood or thought that the  viewer can connect with and so, execution of that concept by way of intriguing camera angle, deliberate lighting, appropriate post processing and even correct selection of paper type for the final print are integral to pulling the audience into the scene.

Al executes his finished product with the initial photographs are captured either in field or a studio type setup and if changes are necessary  to match what is captured in the camera with my original vision they then occur at then end of a computer mouse.  When Al is taking the picture, that part is life.  He believes if the photograph matches his interpretation of what that encounter means to me then he is finished,  if  not then he continues further.  He strives to represent the mood and reflection felt when he was there.  If a gap between the photograph and his imagination needs to be filled, then he fills that gap with tools like photoshop.

To view Al’s work visit:
SmugMug
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Due to the overwhelming success of the Wearable Art Show at the Centre for Creative Arts last fall, this year there will be two showings. This is a good thing, since I don’t think anyone who was there last year will want to miss it, and I’m sure they’ve told their friends about the unique creations on the runway.

Does a Skylin Herba gown constructed from old computer parts, or a Debbie Courvoisier clay tile mini-dress beg the question: what are these artists thinking? Perhaps it’s that we sometimes take art and fashion too seriously.

There are times when we have to dress a certain way (though they are becoming rarer) and artworks that can only be viewed with gravity. But a Lori Kolacz frock made of twisted balloons, ain’t that a kick in the culottes! In a take on fashion that is not so wearable but still a comment on style, our featured artist this issue Candace Gunsolley has made an elegant statement by reusing the  pages of fashion magazines.

Repurposing of materials is also a main feature in cover artist, Jenn Bowes’ pieces. Hour upon hours spent reworking books into a surreal fabric merge her meticulous process with materials that we often overlook. This artist lets the pages tell a tale of their own.

Three of a Kind artist, Ashley Lett, also a presenter at the Wearable Art Show, is a dedicated repurposer – pirating anything that she can make into something “flashy and fashionable”. Shannon Fennel’s wearable art is applied directly to the body and its temporary nature thrills her. Her medium is a living person and fashion just can’t get fresher than that. Following the tradition of her ancestors, Hazel Robinson turns moose hide into art. Hazel creates works that demonstrate how long we humans have had the desire to shine in a piece of unique apparel.

I hope you find this issue inspiring; remember, you are your own work of art.

2011 marked the third year Grande Prairie participated in Alberta Arts Days. Winding down this year’s festival on October 1st, the Centre for Creative Arts hosted its highly anticipated second annual Wearable Arts Show. By popular demand, they held it twice in one night.

This hugely popular, high-energy exhibition encourages local artists and onlookers to explore our relationships with art, fashion, identity, and culture. On the dramatically lit catwalk, clothing becomes a tool for expression and a dynamic piece of art. Using the body as a canvas, it conveys a message, an emotion, or a concept. It compels us to stop and wonder.

Beweave It or Not, Lori Kolacz

It is this sense of marvel that Lori Kolacz hopes she instilled with her fabric-free piece, Beweave it or Not, a short, retro-styled dress woven entirely from over 140 pastel blue and pearly white latex balloons.
Through “twisting”, the art of balloon sculpting, Kolacz satisfies her desire to share joy, laughter, and beauty in every day and to celebrate the transitory quality of life. “In that way,” she explains, “balloons aren’t just for kids.”

A large but often under-appreciated aspect of twisting is the inherently short lifespan of each sculpture. Kolacz’s dress, for example, took six hours to make on the morning of the event to ensure it looked “fresh” for its runway debut. By the next morning, the dress was a deflated shadow of its former self. At once fun, whimsical, and light, Kolacz’s “pop art” Beweave it or Not subtly and generously reminds us to savour every moment.

Some artists presented in the show use things we look at every day but don’t see as fashion. With her post-apocalyptic inspired hoop skirt and bikini called Silicon Beach, artist Skylin Herba takes this one step further by making her outfit of used circuit boards – objects that we not only don’t see as fashion, but that we typically don’t see at all.

Bringing awareness to planned obsolescence and e-waste is a predominant goal Herba explores in this outfit. “Parts of it were created by tearing apart an iBook,” she shares, “I spent so much money on it just a few years ago!” Bits of old DVD players, ceiling hardware, aluminum tape, and coated telephone wire are also built into this piece.

Cloaked in Midnight, Niki Sangra

“It’s not that I want to villainize technology…” Herba continues, “It just makes sense to prioritize our purchases; to not stress so much about having the newest thing out there. Treat what you have well, and try to give it a second life.”

One of the most striking contrasts between conventional fashion and wearable art is the way each acts as an extension of self. Alex, a founder of the highly successful online blog, Fashionartisan, says “You cannot talk about fashion without relating it to the kind of life a person lives.” Wearable art, however, pays no heed to the demands of day to day life. Its currency isn’t determined by brand name or functionality, but a higher level of creative freedom that stimulates our fantasies, fears, and curiosity.

For Niki Sangra, the visionary behind bringing a wearable art event to the centre, this sense of diversity and inclusiveness is what compels her to create wearable art. She draws comparisons between the event and Halloween “where everyone’s given permission to be who they want.”

Reminiscent of a costume worn to a masquerade ball, Sangra’s creation, Cloaked in Midnight, shrouds the wearer in a surprisingly heavy black cape covered in rows upon rows of rustling, hand-made fabric feathers. A simple, form fitting dress in the same colour is worn underneath. Sangra spent months silversmithing an intricate bird-like mask and a glimmering layered necklace that add a magical and mysterious air to her piece. “Contrasting a more static art like painting,” she explains, “wearable art changes every time you move. It lets what’s inside come out… You have to move to it.”

Silicon Beach, Skylin Herba

Few genres can cross and mix so much content with such intrigue and accessibility as wearable art. It shows what popular fashion typically ignores: Beauty has no one-dimensional standard.
If you have any questions about wearable art or about how you can get involved with the show next year, contact the Centre for Creative Arts at 780-814-6080 or info@creativecentre.ca. You can also view video footage of the event at creativecentre.ca.

by Jody Farrell

The annual Art of the Peace Symposium has a reputation for giving creative souls everywhere a healthy
dose of motivation just as those darker months set in. The weekend-long event, which runs from
October 14-16, 2011, in Dawson Creek, BC, is full of mind-expanding talks, images, and hands-on work. Its
presenters are all heavily immersed in the visual arts, and no one walks away without feeling moved at
some level. This year’s speakers include Calgary artists Carl White and Shona Rae, and Dawson Creek-based
artist Jennifer Bowes.

A Name For Your Sea, Carl White

CARL WHITE was born in England and lives and works in Calgary, Alberta, where he graduated from Alberta College of Art and Design (Four Year Diploma in graphic design, painting, and drawing) in 1992.

His paintings, which have been shown in many group and solo exhibitions over the last 19 years, are richly layered and drawn from a wide range of interests. White’s father introduced him to the work of masters such as Rembrandt, instilling an understanding of light and shadows prominent in White’s own luminous works. He credits literature and music of every kind, and even earlier years of skateboarding, with having influenced his art.

In a May 2011 review of his recent exhibition Istoria, writer Marcella Ducasses comments on how White’s highly vivid,historically-driven imagery, still manages to be authentic and fresh:

“Despite the rich allegorical and historical references, White’s work is unmistakably contemporary in its execution. The subject matter may evoke painters of another era, but his expressive brushstrokes, spontaneous and at times violent splashes of exuberant colours, glossy finishes and drips of paint left to their own devices, along with his signature scriptural markings, are White’s — and White’s alone,” Ducasses writes.

“I am interested almost entirely in the process, the act of creation and joining the flow,” White says today. “The work itself is the residue, the dust, the skin that has been shed. I am deeply contradictory in that I often begin in an intellectual pursuit only to try wholeheartedly to break free of it once the painting begins.”

Beauty, Shona Rae

SHONA RAE graduated from The Aberta College of Art and Design with a BFA in 2005. Ten years prior to receiving that degree, the ceramist of 30 years had become enthralled with goldsmithing, a fascination brought on by a series of dreams that led to a new perception that “metal is clay.”

Throughout the winter of 1994-95, night after night, Rae dreamed of hammering metal. Her work had always been inspired by her keen interest in ancient myth, religion and prehistoric archaeological finds. Now, in addition to her already substantial knowledge and mastery of clay, Rae chose to study metals to better render the visions she’d had in those dreams. Her sculptural art jewellery has since won her numerous awards in both Europe and North America.

“I want to celebrate the human inclination to decorate our person and our environment with contemporary artifacts,” Rae says today. She forges, casts, carves and constructs precious metals, sterling silver, gold, and other materials, into symbols re-imagined from imagery found in archeology, mythology and folklore.

Rae’s presentation for the 2011 AOTP Symposium will feature 22 sculptures she has been working on since 1998. These works, entitled Fairy-tales, Folklore and Mythcommunication… include a series of miniature, precious metal sculptures that reference rings and draw the viewer into the story on a conceptual and intimate level, Rae says.

“My lifelong fascination and study of fairy-tales, folklore, religion, myth and Jungian philosophy is the major influence in my artwork. I believe that in our urge to tell stories we seek to give order and meaning to our lives, explain natural phenomena, the complexities of life, (…) the human condition.”

Dream of Scipio, Jennifer Bowes

JENNIFER BOWES is an Alberta-born artist and graduate of the University of Alberta (BFA, 1999; MFA 2003). She has taught at both the U of A and Grande Prairie’s Regional College and currently teaches at Northern Lights College in Dawson Creek.

At the Symposium, Bowes will be covering her works over the last decade, beginning with those related to her masters thesis, in which she argued that a drawing can be made using only texture and shadow, with media other than the usual drawing tools. Her fibre and paper sculptures feature meticulously knotted, knitted, or handsewn work, and speak volumes about the artist’s quiet dedication and resolve.

Her most recent creations have Bowes imposing these repetitious techniques onto paper and then removing them. The final product features what has been left behind. “My work tends to be painstaking and labourious,” she explains. Bowes also spent time in the mountains of Field, BC, and in the Italian Alps, where her surroundings sometimes left her feeling overwhelmed. She wanted to capture this sense of awe in her art, which she sees as being both reactive and expressive. Hundreds of hours of small, quiet, repeated gestures produce an artwork whose “silent voice becomes very present,” Bowes says.

Artist and colleague Sarah Alford says Bowes’ decade of teaching has developed an unmatched devotion to both the program she undertakes and the students she prepares.

“I’ve never met anyone who works so hard,” Alford remarks. “I would even say the (Northern Lights) College itself may have underestimated Jenn’s ambition.”

Bowes is responsible for initiating a visual culture program aimed at preparing students to critically evaluate their own visual production and the visual environment that surrounds them. Alford says these new courses put Dawson Creek “in line with programs in Canada’s major art colleges and universities.”

by Margaret Price

For a moment we sit in silence as Jennifer Bowes ruminates on my question.

Undoubtedly, she is asked one like it quite often. After all, when one has produced such abstract and visually stimulating work as Bowes has, others become inquisitive, probing into the landscape of the creative. What are your biggest inspirations and influences? What medium do you gravitate towards? How do you describe your approach to art?

Today, the question is modest, inherent: “Why are you an artist?”

After a few moments of quiet reflection, Bowes replies, in standard form, with an acute awareness of herself and her work and the cognitive processes behind both, her vocal presence at once soft spoken and commanding, deliberate yet effortless.
“Everyone asks why I do what I do and I answer that I just feel compelled to do it,” she says. “A lot of people say I’m compulsive but that’s not true because I choose to do this. Compulsion is when you don’t choose. I just need to do that repetitive behavior.”

It is this repetition that informs and defines Bowes’ work; work that is most assuredly process-driven. Each gesture, no matter how small, is significant, quietly imbued with reiteration and slight variation, capturing a moment, thought or silent pause. Through repetition, Bowes reaches a sort of contemplative, trancendental and grounding state; a state of recognition and awareness, a state balancing delicately between two experiences of time, an active moment and an extended period.

Ski Tracks, Inspiration for In Silence

As with many Peace Region artists, Bowes is influenced by her physical environment and draws upon memories of her childhood landscape. When not at school, Bowes would escape to the mountains for four months out of the year to work on an organic farm. It was here that she first became acquainted with the process of repetition that would define much of her later work. Then: plowing, sowing, planting, walking, hiking, breathing – now: knotting, knitting, carving, marking, stitching – perpetual movement attempting to achieve, in the artist’s own words, a balance between control and chance.

More recently, Bowes cites travel as being influential to her life and work. After graduating from the University of Alberta with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Painting and Drawing, Bowes spent a year teaching English in northern Italy in the small town of Sondrio. It was here that Bowes transitioned from figurative art to abstraction, taking a keen interest in textures and printmaking. Amongst the stunning, towering, textural aged wall reliefs and architectural motifs that almost seemed to have voices, Bowes became interested in the fact that, within each work, there exists a duality of both silence and vocality. “I found that trying to find voices within silence was really influential to my work, and trying to bring that into the work where the piece I was making had a voice of its own and didn’t necessarily need me to be there to explain it.”

In Silence Companion Piece Detail

Perhaps this duality is best illustrated in The Dream of Scipio, one work in a series Bowes completed for her MFA Thesis Exhibition. In a sort of collaboration with the writer, Bowes took a book with hundreds of pages and, using white thread, ran a double stitch over every letter of the book, inflicting an element of illegibility and forcing the viewer to approach the work in a different way. Instead of perceiving the work with our minds, we perceive the work tactually, with our hands. “It’s a book of hundreds of thousands of stitches,” she says. “I was trying to impose silence on the book so that you could put your own thoughts into it because I find when I hold a book, I’m not necessarily interested in the text itself but the presence of the book.” The resulting piece, more than just an amalgamation of meaningless alterations, is a record of the touch and intent of the creator, impregnated with the opinions and emotions with which the material was altered, thus serving as a container for thought. “Even though you couldn’t read the words of the book, the voice was still there and the reference of the book was still there.” Sometimes, through silence, we hear the loudest voice.

Another work illustrating Bowes’ awareness of and reverence for stillness is In Silence, a sewn paper piece inspired by her work on the organic farm. As part of her job, Bowes learned how to drive horses, becoming interested in the resulting furrows in the soil. In the winter, Bowes would replicate those furrows by skiing parallel lines into the field and she responded to her environment by bringing those lines back into the studio. “In the morning I would ski in the field and in the afternoon I would come back and fold the paper and sew it, so it was always this back and forth between the landscape and the work,” she says. “I was trying to respond to the silence I was capturing and then trying to bring it right back to the work.”

  

LEFT In Silence - detail CENTRE Suspended - detail RIGHT Suspended

A work Bowes completed for the 2007 Alberta Biennial, Suspended sees Bowes perform a number of transformative labor techniques to impart a subtractive and reconfigured aesthetic to her work. Again taking inspiration from her environment in the form of an oriole’s nest she found during a walk, Bowes adhered to her repetitive processes to create a contemplative environment through which one can experience a profoundly different connection to an object. “For me, using repetition, and sewing and knitting the paper was kind of like creating a home for my thoughts, so the shape of a nest was fitting.” A piece two years in the making, Bowes meticulously cut each line of text out of a book, ran the disjointed strips of text through a sewing machine and knit the shreds back together, creating what looks to be a large, interconnected, albeit slightly abstracted, finely-woven knit garment. “I wanted to create a piece that, when you stood far away from it, looked like a cohesive object and when you got closer, it fell apart and started to look like it was unraveling. So you have two experiences of the same object, and you yourself become suspended between those two perceptions of the piece, so you have to figure out how you feel about it.” Bowes forces the viewer to come to terms with the appearance of a work of art juxtaposed with its actual meaning by presenting a coherent shape composed of small, quiet gestures. In Suspended, Bowes’ subtle gestures alter the physicality of the object in question, and what remains is a devotional record of the gentle interaction between creator and object, and by extension the interaction between object and viewer. “I read the book every time I manipulated it, so the process is kind of honoring the book, taking it apart and then putting it back together.”

After Suspended, Bowes returned to the comfort of figurative art and portraiture for a brief period of time, yet still never deviated from repetition. Taking inspiration from an Italian window shutter with handles depicting a man’s and woman’s face meant to represent Janus, the Roman god who looks forward and backward into the future and past, Bowes set off on a project to complete 200 carved porcelain double-sided heads, entitled Head Project. “I really was interested in how closely the faces looked to my other work when you looked at them from a distance,” she says. “They’re still dealing with repetition but with repetition you have variation, and at the same time they were very quiet, responding with this silent voice. So the same thread ran through this piece even though my work isn’t dealing with a stitch any more, it’s dealing with faces.”

Head Project

Of late, Bowes has explored the relationship between labour and destruction, and the resulting humility. In her In Silence Companion Piece, Bowes approaches the material in the same way, attempting to alter its physicality by folding and sewing the paper. However, she takes the process one step further by cutting all the stitches away, framing the piece of paper so viewers can see not only her initial alterations, but the absence of the marks she’s inflicted upon the paper. “I think this piece was influenced by when I was trying to ski the parallel lines into the field,” she says. “It’s so windy up here that all those lines kept getting blown in and I was really frustrated. But there is something really beautiful about that, too, and I thought that I needed to capture that humility on paper. What if I destroy my labor, and what kind of voice is left behind?”

For Bowes, a work is never really finished until the seemingly arbitrary duality between silence and vocality is realized. “The piece tells me when it’s done,” she says. “Making a piece is like having a child. There’s a certain point where the child starts to talk back and have its own voice, and I feel it’s the same way when you’re making work. When the work starts to speak for itself, then you have to back away and try to figure out what it’s saying.”

As an artist, one can impart vocality to a certain extent, achieve recognition through repetition, but only once a piece has realized vocality can one respond, in silence and humility. “I think as an artist, as a teacher, as a student, you always have to be willing to venture in the part that is unknown,” she says. “I think it’s more important in the process not to know how it’s going to end, for the work to have its own voice, and I think for me, the more I step back and let that work become its own, the better. Allowing humility to filter in and determine what the work is going to be like is really important to me.”