People who want to indulge their curiosity about how art is created will have an opportunity next month when artists with the WAVE Interlake Artists Studio Tour throw open their doors to the public.
WAVE artists from Arborg to St. Andrews and Dunnottar to Gimli are taking part in two studio tours in June and September.
Several WAVE artists were on hand at the Gimli Art Gallery on May 6 to showcase their unique works of art and provide demonstrations to the public.
The three-hour event, which included a light buffet, attracted dozens of people wanting to get the lowdown on how artists work with paint, glass, wood, metal and other media to bring their creative visions to life.
“We had close to 50 people come through already,” said Jerry Maryniuk, a retired forensic artist, cartoonist, author and sculptor who specializes in creating works of art out of home-grown gourds. “We have 18 artists involved with this year’s WAVE tours.”
Gary Foidart, a Metis artist from Winnipeg Beach, had an array of chisels lined up to show people how he shapes wood into artwork. He also uses chainsaws and electrified probes, but he left those tools at home so as not to cause a ruckus in the club’s workroom.
He harvests his own wood and will show you how to navigate the grain using different sized chisels.
“I’m really a chainsaw carver; that’s my main gig. It can be dangerous,” he said as he demonstrated how to chisel on what will be a wall-hanging of a woman with flowing hair. “You have to carve with the grain. You’ll know which way the grain is going because the chisel will get caught. If it starts tearing out the wood, I know the grain has changed direction and I need to chisel from another angle.”
He also specializes in Lichtenberg burning in which he electrocutes wood to create stunning designs. The electricity gouges a pathway in the wood that he sometimes fills with a glow-in-the-dark epoxy.
“I rewired a microwave oven transformer. I have wires on two leads attached to screwdrivers that you push into the wood. I dampen the wood and back off 20 feet. Then you basically electrocute it,” he said. “It only takes one shock and you learn how to do it safely. The guys that get burnt hold on to the leads.”
Breaking pieces of glass to make intensely colourful decorative and functional artwork seems less risky. Artist Patricia Tymkiw, who is new to the WAVE tour this year, has special tools to score and break coloured glass into small pieces that she incorporates into her artwork.
“I cut glass into squares that become part of the design, such as seeds for a flower, then put it into a kiln for 24 hours so that it becomes one piece,” said Tymkiw.
She buys sheets of glass that are naturally coloured through minerals such as gold (red) and mercury or zinc (pink).
Heather Dawson also works with glass, making decorative art such as lanterns and jewellery with designs that are screen-printed right onto the glass.
“Basically, it’s like screen-printing on a T-shirt,” said Dawson, demonstrating how to make a bookmark on paper using acrylic ink. “I’ll make a design on the computer, print off a stencil and cover my screen with emulsion paint. The emulsion fills the tiny squares in the screen which transfers onto the glass. Afterwards it goes into the kiln and gets fired so it becomes sintered onto the surface.”
The public can visit the artists in their studios from June 10-11 and from September 2-3. For information about the artists and where their studios are located, visit www.watchthewave.ca
