When people can’t go and see artists there is only one recourse to making things right.
You bring art to the people instead.
Enter the 2020 version of the Art at the Gate Festival taking place virtually from the scenic coastline of Twillingate and New World Island.
After a successful first run of the Art at the Gate Festival in 2019, organizers wanted to keep things going in 2020.
That was before a global pandemic and the subsequent restrictions snuffed out any semblance of a normal festival season.
Still, organizers were keen.
“We wanted to keep the name alive,” said festival chairperson Kathy Murphy-Peddle. “We wondered if we could come up with something creative.”
This year’s Art at the Gate festival is vastly different than its first edition.
With the inability to gather in person and appreciate the work being done by artists in the province, the festival turned online.
Work started in August to put something together for this fall.
As such, the Art at the Gate Festival is giving supporters the chance to paint along — or just watch — two of the province’s finest Plein air (outdoor) painters do what they do best.
Open air painter Jean Claude Roy takes a break from his work as a part of the Art at the Gate Festival in Twillingate in September. Contributed photo
In September, well-known landscape artists Jean Claude Roy and Clifford George visited Twillingate and completed an outdoor session in the region.
That session was recorded for the Art at the Gate Festival. Both of those sessions will be launched in the next week as the festival kicks into gear.
Each will be free for anyone who registers at the festival’s website. After you register, you will be emailed a YouTube link to each session that you can access on and after the launch day.
Roy’s session will air virtually on Oct. 25 at 1 p.m. Newfoundland time, while the session featuring George is scheduled to go online on Nov. 1 at the same time.
At time of writing, the Art at the Gate festival had more than 300 people registered, some of them will be viewing the sessions internationally.
“The interest is amazing,” said Murphy-Peddle.
George’s session landed him in Jenkin’s Cove portion of the region. He said there was strong wind as he got about to painting and shooting.
“If there is a plus (to the pandemic) is that it forced us to think outside the box. We’ve probably reached a bigger audience.”
“It was excellent,” he said of the session. “It was a wonderful place for scenery.”
When George was asked to be a part of the event, he was quick to say yes and lend his style.
The idea is for the viewer to be completely immersed in the painting as it unfolds in front of them.
Murphy-Peddle said how people choose to enjoy the experience is completely up to them.
They are encouraging people to settle into their studios or their homes and paint along. There will be reference photos posted on the festival’s website to help with that process.
Those who do paint along are being encouraged to send in photos of their completed works.
For those who might not be artistically inclined, they’re being encouraged to sit back and enjoy watching the paintings slowly come into focus.
“If there is a plus (to the pandemic) is that it forced us to think outside the box,” said Murphy-Peddle. “We’ve probably reached a bigger audience.”
Nicholas Mercer is a local journalism initiative reporter for central Newfoundland for SaltWire Network.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
