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Cultural Arts Society chooses 2020 board

Chemainus Valley Cultural Arts Society board members: (back row) Steve Hughes, Director; Peggy Grigor, Past Chair; Tom Farnsworth, Director; Bev Knight, Chair; (seated) Chrissy Kemppi, Secretary; Craig Harris, Membership Committee Chair; Joan Roberts, Treasurer; Kathy Wachs, Director. Not in photo: Mark Kiemele, Director; Val Bob, Director; Connie Crocker, Director.
Chemainus Valley Cultural Arts Society chooses new board
Members of the Chemainus Valley Cultural Arts Society voted in a board for the coming year at their Annual General Meeting, February 27 at the Royal Canadian Legion hall.

Bev Knight will remain as Chair; Peggy Grigor as Past Chair;  Chrissy Kemppi, Secretary; Joan Roberts, Treasurer; Craig Harris, Membership Committee Chair. Directors are: Kathy Wachs, Tom Farnsworth, Val Bob, Mark Kiemele, Connie Crocker, and Steve Hughes.

Knight said 2019 was a banner year for the society. Its visual arts program, organized through the Rainforest Arts gallery, was an ‘outstanding success’, “Rainforest Arts represents over 60 local artists in all mediums.”

A busy year of musical performances and events was conducted at the bandshell in Waterwheel Park; Pat’s House of Jazz at the Osborne Bay Pub in Crofton, and at the Legion hall. “Last year was just so successful,” Knight said. “We’re thrilled with the amount of people that came to all the concerts – Tuesday nights (at the bandshell) were exceptional.”

Knight also highlighted Aboriginal Day, June 21, which was produced by Director Val Bob. “There were dancers, musicians, story-tellers, and good food.”

The board is hoping for continued success in 2020, and a $22,000 operating grant from the BC Arts Council – the first such grant to have been awarded the CVCAS – will help the society bring even more programs and cultural entertainment to the community.

Knight thanked local and cultural sponsors who have contributed to the organization, including: the BC Arts Council, First Peoples Health, the Cowichan Valley Regional District, the Chemainus Business Improvement Association, The Royal Canadian Legion – Branch 191, the Coastal Community Credit Union, and the Lions Club.

“And the businesses in town were just phenomenal,” she added.

You can find out more about the Chemainus Valley Cultural Arts Society and its events and programs at cvcas.com. Go to cvcas.com/membership/ to find out how you can join, donate or get involved.
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From Land and Sea, Vancouver Island inspires

Pinned to a cork board on the wall of Linda Yurgensen’s studio is a photo of her and her father painting together during a recent trip she took back to her home province, Nova Scotia. It’s a reminder of her very first inclination to translate reality into a representative vision through art.

Retired now, Allen Horne was a pipe fitter and plumber during working hours; father to six children, and an avid hunter and painter when time permitted. He first inspired his daughter to pick up pencil and brush.

“I grew up watching my father paint, he painted part time – never really showing his work anywhere,” she recalled. She remembers sketching, and occasionally asking if she could use some of his paint in her own works.

But after she entered her teens, the love of painting went dormant in Yurgensen for many years. “I did it up to a certain age, until I was maybe 13 or 14, and then I kind-of forgot about it,” she said.

She married, worked, raised a family and moved – in 1992 – to the Cobble Hill home, where she and her husband Eric still live. “For years and years it didn’t really occur to me to pick up a paintbrush,” she said. Not, in fact, until 10 or 12 years ago, a hiatus of about three decades, did she set brush to canvas again.

Once again, her dad helped her get going. “My father kind of encouraged me,” she recounted. “He sent me a book for Christmas one year, Painting with Pastels, and that’s how I first started, pastels.”

Since then, she’s been making up for lost time in the narrow studio, which looks suspiciously like a converted front porch, where she works. The urge to paint has become “an overwhelming desire to do something creative,” she said. What inspires her now are the forests, landscapes and seascapes of her Vancouver Island home… and always colour, vibrant hues of reflected sunlight.

“I just did it for the enjoyment of it, basically. And I noticed as I was doing it my work was getting better,” she said. 

She took one course in watercolours, tried pastels, went on to acrylics, but gravitated to oils as her preferred medium. “Oil is my love,” she said. “I really love oil, probably won’t ever leave oil.” Although she’s self-taught and paints by her own light, Yurgensen does admire The Group of Seven, and some of her work is reminiscent of Canada’s most famous artistic movement.

And like the Group of Seven, her work is deeply evocative of place, of Vancouver Island. We do get plenty of cloudy, rain-sodden days here, but Yurgensen sees and portrays them as anything but drab. “When I look at a foggy day, even, I’m not seeing grey, I’ll see purple and blue.” 

She wants viewers to experience her new homeland’s contours, shapes and hues through her art. “I’m hoping they see the West Coast as I do, not as a drab place, but the beautiful, green, lush, colourful rainforest, which is Vancouver Island,” she said. “Before I came I had no idea that this was here, now I’m never going to leave.”

To achieve the feel she wants, Yurgensen starts with a primed canvas, colours that with a primary colour, ‘something bright’ in acrylic. Then she paints her scene on, again in acrylic. “When that’s all dry,” she said, “I go in with my oils, but I don’t layer, I just lay the colours side-by-side, so you get an optical illusion when you look at it. It’s not blended.”

The artist’s life isn’t easy. Getting your work into galleries is hard, and when the work is rejected, it’s hard not to question why. “You wonder, it it the art, or is it just not the right time?” You have to push through and keep going. “I would say, just keep doing what you love, and eventually, others are going to love it too,” Yurgensen said.

Linda Yurgensen will be featured artist January 6 through February at Rainforest Arts, 9781 Willow Street in Chemainus, open from 11 am to 4 pm daily. She will be hosting an art demo Saturday, Jan. 18 from 2 to 4pm at the gallery.

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CitizenX: Arts & Culture

I have to put a disclaimer on top of this post, because I’m a writer and my partner Diana Durrand is an artist. So, if what follows seems slanted, all I have to say is: It’s about bloody time somebody slanted things in favour of Canada’s artists, who have been, for a long time, at the wrong end of a very long table, where everyone else gets served first… CS

Citizen X is Mid-Island Focus’s survey of issues heading into the Oct. 21 Canadian Federal Election. MiF is providing background  and asking questions a typical voter might ask.

Painters, musicians, dancers, writers, actors – all those captured under the term ‘artists’ in its broadest sense – have much to be grateful for. The federal government’s contribution to the Canada Council for the Arts has been increasing incrementally, with the goal of growing the CC’s ‘investments in the arts’ to $310 million annually as part of its five-year strategic plan – that’s a doubling of funding for artists and arts organizations by 2021.

As part of that plan, the Canada Council has ‘drastically’ simplified programs and lightened ‘administrative processes’ so it will be able to channel ’88% of the federal government’s $550 million over five years directly into the arts sector.’

A bit of redistribution is taking place, too. New recipients will be eligible for 25% of the funding, indigenous peoples’ art funding will be tripled, and $88.5 million will be channeled into initiatives to ‘increase the quality, range and sharing of art through digital’ means.

A lot of thought has gone into realigning priorities at Canada’s go-to national funding organization for Arts & Culture with the creative challenges and opportunities of the times. So would the arts community be pulling an Oliver Twist by begging “Please Sir, I want some more?”

Let’s look at the picture from a different perspective:

  • $310 million is less than one tenth of one percent of the $355.6 billion 2019 federal budget;
  • In an era of rapid technological and social change, it is increasingly difficult for individual artists to innovate and make a living;
  • The world needs creative visions and challenging portrayals from outside the mainstream now more than ever.

So, on the one hand, it can be argued that significant increases in arts funding have been put on the table; on the other, a case can be made for continued and increased investments, if we want to sustain a vibrant, stimulating arts sector.

Another area where the federal government could make a significant difference is amendments to the Canadian Copyright Act, which is currently under review. This is an incredibly complex and contentious process, but one thing is clear: artists – particularly literary and visual artists – do not feel well-served by the current Act.

One idea that has been proposed is secondary royalties for artists on resale of copyrighted works. Books, for instance, are resold much faster these days than was ever the case a quarter century ago. Online resellers like Amazon are flogging used copies of recent releases before the appies have been digested at the official book launch.

Writers do not receive royalties on those resales, but the of new books is almost certainly dampened when used copies flood the online shelves before the bloom is off.

Painters and other visual artists often have to sell their works at less than subsistence rates when they are unknown, only to see the same works sell at inflated values after the artists have achieved recognition. A secondary royalty on resale would ameliorate that situation.

Nothing’s ever simple when it comes to the arts economy in general, copyright in particular, but…

CitizenX would like to know:

  • Would your party likely reduce, maintain or seek to improve Arts & Cultural funding during its mandate? How?
  • Do you and your party believe mechanisms have to be considered to ensure artists are fairly compensated for their work?
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The inspired whimsy of Morgan Bristol

Clocks with feathered hands, birds that ‘could be’ crows with four legs and stiletto beaks… Morgan Bristol, who will be featured artist at Rainforest Arts for the months of July and August, gets lost for hours at a time in a world of insightful whimsy, where he discovers art that delights and informs.

“I like to have a bit of character, comedy, in there so that people may have a little laugh, or see something in there that they can identify with,” he said at his studio, next to La Petite Auction House at 9686 Chemainus road, which he and wife Dawn Geddie operate.

To the uninitiated Bristol’s modest work space seems a combination repair shop, of some sort, and painter’s studio. That reflects his dual artistic persona: as a metal artist on the one hand; painter on the other, the painter in him only having emerged in the last year-and-a-half.

“I was trained as a metal artist, a jeweller” he explained, “and everything was sort of tactile and 3D, so this is kind of a new venture for me and I’m thoroughly enjoying it,” he said of his 2D debut.

There’s a sense of joy in most of his works, be they three-dimensional, or two. Clocks aren’t meant to measure time, really, so much as to make light of it; crows – if indeed the birds depicted in his recent works are of the Corvine family – aren’t meant to fly, so much as make us ask how flight is even possible.

Purposeful whimsy might be a good phrase to capture the spirit of Bristol’s work.

He’s especially excited to have his paintings featured. For someone who picked up the brush and spatula such a short time ago, he has created pieces that are innovative and captivating. You can’t help trying to imagine the world these creatures might inhabit – a world that’s an expression of Bristol’s own imagination.

“I seem to channel something when I’m painting,” he said. “It’s something that happens, and I can lose two or three hours in a second, and almost come-to and it’s done. It’s all intuitive in that sense.”

Intuitive, but worked with an almost sculptural passion. For Bristol the process is as important as what emerges out of it. “As far as the paintings go, I was never a lover of flat images. I always wanted to do something to those flat paintings, so that said, in this batch, I work in texture.”

His paintings are built up in many layers, Bristol explained, using just about any material that comes to hand. He listed paint, caulking material, gyprock mud, even tar as ingredients he uses to change the ‘contours’ of his paintings ‘until I get something that I like.”

Morgan Bristol’s art will be featured at Rainforest Arts, 9781 Willow Street, Chemainus, in July and August. The gallery is open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily. More information at RainforestArts.ca or info@rainforestarts.ca.

Asked if the birds depicted on his canvases were crows, Bristol replied, “Could be,” and laughed. “It’s a hybrid, definitely a hybrid, open to interpretation.” Come see for yourself and take some flights of serious fancy interpreting his works. His July 1 opening will feature live music and, of course, Bristol himself.

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B.C. poets, authors gathered in Nanaimo for Spring Writes May 2-5

The Federation of B.C. Writers held its annual Spring Writes conference and AGM in Nanaimo May 2 to 5, and writers from all over the province converged on the Vancouver Island Convention Centre for four days of workshops, presentations, blue pencil sessions and hobnobbing.

Presentations and workshops included everything from the art and craft of writing, to strategies for pitching your manuscript to publishers, to 21st Century promotional tools writers can use to get their work into the hands and minds of readers, to discussions about the relevance of literature in an era of digital entertainment.

As a novelist, Fed member, and MiF reporter, yours truly took in as much of the action as was humanely possible on the conference Saturday,  and – as much as I learned sitting in on the workshops and panels – I had to admit I missed out on much more than I took in. Kudos to the Fed, and to the Nanaimo area members in particular, for pulling together such a rich program of events.

My observer’s day started at 8 a.m., with a Morning Write, facilitated by Keith Liggett. The day before participants had been assigned a 200 word ‘show, not tell’ writing assignment, which they were to read to the group during the Saturday session. The stories were good, many would have earned a high grade in any course or contest… but Liggett could always find something to offer to improve the pieces, or at least for the writer to consider.

“It’s about habits, and it’s about opening creativity and opening doors, and being forced to do things that you wouldn’t do on your own, if you were just sitting in your closet and writing,” he said.

A raison d’être of the FBCW is to get writers out of solitary, bring them together, and help them engage, though collaborative learning and sharing, the realities of writing as an art and a discipline. Inspiration is a spark that ignites the creative naphtha; then the work of putting all the pieces together into a superbly crafted story begins.

Poet and Author Betsy Warland, during a panel on the whys and hows of publishing, said the vital role of creative writing in the 21st Century has not been diminished by the deluge of new media bringing entertainment and information to audiences.

Literature takes us places no other media can, places we need to go. “There’s so much that’s still missing in our collective narrative – that is forbidden, stereotyped,” she said. “We need to have these narratives present in our collective brain and understanding. So that’s why I think it’s important to publish a book.”

The sources of inspiration and information may be different, but youth are still drawn to creating and reading literature. Said Adam, to a gathering of youth at Literacy Central Vancouver Island, “Really, if you want to get to know a character, and get to know a world, reading is the best way to do it.” And bringing those kinds of penetrating experiences to readers is what drives him to write. “What’s closer to magic than being able to do that for someone else?” he said.

You can find out more about the Federation of BC Writers on their web site. For writers and poets who want resources and camaraderie along the way, it’s an organization that’s there for you.

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Featured Rainforest artist captures equine essence

Eleven years ago, Antonia Olak was walking in the trails near her home in Qualicum, when she encountered a couple of equestrians, one riding Gypsy, the horse that would inspire a series of paintings capturing the spirit of its kind: freedom, speed and surging power.

It was a eureka moment. “That whole experience will never leave me, I was just so excited,” she said, recalling the instant. “I was doing horse profiles before then, but this is the one where everything clicked, and I realized what I was doing.”

Olak wanted to capture the essence of the animals in abstract representations. More than that, she wanted to separate the equine qualities from any background noise, and place her likenesses on absolutely still canvases.

“I feel that extra space gives it a bit of weight, it’s a very quiet image, not quite vulnerable, but just calm,” she said. There’s a felt-tension between the abstract representations of the horses, and the limitless background – the works capture her subjects’ essence, without limiting their vital energy.

In Machusla, a ‘roly-poly’ somewhat clumsy animal she had actually ridden herself, Olak saw qualities many would not have detected. “As a painter, you understand, once you get going, that a painting has a life of its own, and it takes off and you just go with the flow, right?” she remembered.

“Well I realize what I did, was I got Machusla’s spirit, but it doesn’t look like Machusla at all,” Olak said. “She was always so willing to please, and so excited to be ridden, and she had this wonderful spirit.”

The negative space in Olak’s works is often linen instead of canvas, with the horses rendered in charcoal and acrylic. The works aren’t behind glass, so she has finished them with a polymer medium and varnish to fix and protect the actual image.

In some of the paintings Olak has included calligraphic elements. “A lot of my abstracts are like writing,” she said. “My mentor when I was young was Jack Wise.” An artist known for his eastern philosophy, mandalas and calligraphy.

Olak is the featured artist at Rainforest Arts in Chemainus for the months of May and June. She will have an Artist’s Demonstration at the gallery, 9781 Willow Street in Chemainus, May 11 from 1 to 3 pm. Go to RainforestArts.ca for more info.

CraigSpenceWriter.ca

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Dandelions ‘eulogized’ by Rainforest featured artist


American philosopher and naturist Ralph Waldo Emerson eulogized weeds as plants ‘whose virtues have not been discovered.

It’s in that spirit that Artist Diana Durrand portrays the common dandelion (Taraxacum Officinale), using bold paintings, delicate drawings and elegant sculptures, all intended to override our entrenched suburban bias against this much maligned species.

Her tribute, 100 Sleeping Dandelions, will be on display at Rainforest Arts, Chemainus, B.C. where Diana Durrand will be Featured Artist  for the months of March and April.

“From root to flower the dandelion is an edible, useful plant, its medicinal properties common knowledge among herbalists the world over,” Durrand says.

Yet, universally categorized as a noxious weed by homeowners and gardeners, the dandelion is mown down, poisoned and uprooted whenever it pops up on North American lawns, its hardy, prolific and incredibly adaptable nature the only things keeping the species from eradication.

“With this eclectic body of work my goal is to represent the many aspects of the dandelion I have experienced, from my earliest delights as a child, to the nihilistic adult attitude that has been cultivated by the home & garden industry,” Durrand says.

“I’m hoping viewers can tap into some of their own childhood memories of picking, smelling, tasting and exchanging dandelions.”

Is the dandelion an ‘invasive species’, introduced to North America and the rest of the world by the planet’s most pervasive invader, European Homo Sapiens; or is it a hardy, totally edible plant that has adapted to its new environments and flourished against all odds, to the benefit of human kind?

100 Sleeping Dandelions will shed some golden light on that question. You can preview the works at DianaDurrand.com

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Artist draws viewers Into the Stillness

Arts & Culture

Who knows where the wellsprings of creativity might be found? Growing up on a farm near the hamlet of Carlea, Saskatchewan, Patt Scrivener used to cycle to spot where a culvert flowed under the Canadian National Railway tracks, forming a pond that stayed throughout the summer. It was her ‘secret place,’ where she could go and ‘reflect’.

Into the Stillness, her feature exhibit at Rainforest Arts, which runs from Jan. 11 to Feb. 28, reminds her of that place, which is to say, even if it’s not the sole source of inspiration, it’s certainly a tributary she can trace, inviting people to join in her meditations.

“Water, for me anyways, takes me to a place of calmness and stillness, and a place of inner reflection, and I would hope with the paintings, that people will be able to look into them and be able to go to that place themselves,” Scrivener said. “Into the Stillnessis about going on that journey to that quiet, reflective place.”

Getting there on canvas isn’t the same as jumping on your bike and pedaling down the road. In fact, Scrivener says her scenes are more a geography of mind than representations of actual places. Her techniques bear that out.

She rarely works from photographs, and her process isn’t representational. The first step she takes, confronted with whitespace, is to ‘activate the canvas’. “I work very freely and loosely to begin with,” she said. “It just means taking the canvas from pure, blank white to having some action-marks on it.”

Brushes, pencils, spatulas, scrapers – Scriveners’ ‘mark-making’ tool kit is just as likely to include implements you’d buy at Canadian Tire as Opus Art Supplies. That’s not to say she’s just spreading paint randomly. Before the paint goes down, she sets her intentions, bringing to mind what she wants to emerge. “Those things are going to start showing up, because you’re thinking about it and you’re putting down paint in such a way that it might lead to where you’re going.”

‘Might’ is the operative word. You have to have a lot of faith in the process, and a willingness to let go. Asked if the process is sort of like jumping out of an airplane, without a parachute, hoping one will materialize, she said: “That would be a pretty good analogy.” The trick is to ‘not worry about the results,’ trust in the process, and have some fun pushing paint around, believing what you’re looking for will emerge.

She calls it ‘getting into the flow.’

“Once I get the canvas covered in lots of information, I start homing into my intuition to see if I see something, or a feeling, and then I start developing the painting based on that.” The artist’s intentions materialize through a process that opens up to their possibilities.  “I believe that the paintings come through me, if I allow it and that’s a lot about allowing, and trusting, and believing, and allowing you to get into that flow state.”

Scrivener is the featured artist at Rainforest Arts – 9871 Willow Street, Chemainus in the Coastal Community Credit Union building – from Jan. 11 through to the end of February. Rainforest Arts is open seven days a week, 11a.m. to 4p.m. She will be holding an artist’s talk Jan 17 at 11 a.m., and demos Jan. 17 and Feb. 14 from 12:30 to 3 p.m. (in the Coastal Community Credit Union). More at RainforestArts.caor 250-246-4861.

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Artist Bryan Wilson’s Fine Line

For artist Bryan Wilson there’s a direct line between his love of the outdoors, and his passion to create art, and it shows up on his canvases. “I fish lots, I love my boating,” he said. “Any time I go out and do the things I love, I’m always thinking about my art.” And gathering inspiration in notebooks, video clips and photos.

But his experiences as an avid angler, who has trekked into BC’s wilderness and travelled to tropical climes in pursuit of a catch, aren’t depicted representationally. Wilson meticulously renders his images in pen and ink drawings, and if you look closely, you will almost always find there’s white space between the thousands of elements that come together in his works like an unimaginably complex puzzle. Continue reading “Artist Bryan Wilson’s Fine Line”