It might not look themed, but all the paintings in “Honouring the Past” explore the artists’ personal connections to history in Timmins or further afield.
Art
Art brings history to life at ‘Honouring the Past
|
|
75th anniversary of the Porcupine Art club shows Timmins’ creative passion, then and now
The exhibit opened at a reception Wednesday evening and runs until Dec. 30th.
Current member Cathy Cribbs’ “Set in Stone – Deadman’s Point” draws from her memories of visiting the cemetery with her Finnish community on Christmas Eve. It was a tradition to snowshoe out to the family’s graves and leave an ice candle on it, she said. Cribbs illustrated the ice candles with pieces of glass.
Curator Karen Bachmann looked through the museum’s collection to select the best pieces from the art club’s founders and early members and put them on display in the centre of the gallery.
A convincing Timmins street scene by Doris Sturgeon was found at a garage sale and purchased by the club a decade ago. The small, fine painting is also on display.
“Early Falls Cascade,” a watercolour by Helen Chisolm from 1961, is a stand-out piece for Paul Raiche with the museum. Chisolm was the club’s only professional artist.
“She’s getting in a lot of information with an economy of means,” said Raiche, who holds a Bachelors of Fine Art from the University of Ottawa. “I love her free, gestural strokes that are suggesting trees, and the perspective of the hills in the background.”
“Helen and Ellen, I feel like they’re talking to each other, they’re in the same caliber,” said Raiche.
“Say HER Name,” by Karina Miki Douglas-Takayesu, grew out of her frustrations as a reference librarian when trying to complete research requests about women who lived in Timmins. These requests can come from families who wish to know more about their ancestors.
“Say HER Name” depicts 12 women of historical significance, and the artist intends to add 12 more.
“Too often they were listed as Mrs. (husband’s full name) without any regard to her given first name and identity,” wrote Douglas-Takayesu in her artist’s statement.
In 1918, Timmins town council set aside $300 to raise a plaque in Keon’s memory, a plan which was never carried out. In was not until another pandemic in 2021, that council recommitted to honour the plan.
“Here we Are” by Lynne Nyman, depicts siblings playing amongst Hollinger houses on Laurier Avenue in the 1950s. Nyman saw the photo on the Facebook group, “Timmins, then and now,” and asked its owner, Marcel Gauthier, if she could paint it. He agreed, and Nyman brought the black and white painting to life by painting it in colour.
Gauthier attended the reception on Wednesday evening.
“My dad was a miner. He was what they called a sampler,” he told The Daily Press. “They’re the guys that went in to determine if there’s enough gold in the ore. They’d chip it and take it to the assay office who would assay it and see if there was sufficient gold to drill and blast.”
Gauthier said Nyman got it mostly right.
“The grass is a bit long, I think we cut it a bit better than that,” he joked. “It’s good. That’s the way the house and the neighbour’s house looked, and where the kids hid behind the wall.”
His siblings, Elaine and Mark, have yet to see the painting.
The final product is made up of 70 canvases from a pattern by Cathy Cribbs. It shows Timmins year-round, in a swirl of activity from skating to picking blueberries. The northern lights are depicted, as is a logging truck about to collide with a moose.
Carpentry teacher Barry Trebilcock and students from Timmins Vocational High built the frame.
The 70 small canvases, when put together, reveal Cribbs’ design. It is marred only by one incomplete canvas painted by a four-year-old child who was clearly too young for the activity. PAC members voted to include it, nonetheless.
Belleve Peltier, 7, had been waiting to see the final piece since the summer. “I put a lot of feeling into my work,” she said of the tile she painted of the McIntyre Headframe. “I think it’s incredible.”
“Honouring the Past – an exhibit by members of the Porcupine Art Club,” runs until Dec. 30 in the Grey Gallery of the Timmins Museum, 325 Second Ave. Admission is free.
Continue Reading
What’s the deal with Leonardo’s harpsichord-viola? Why were Impressionists obsessed with the color purple? Art Bites brings you a surprising fact, lesser-known anecdote, or curious event from art history. These delightful nuggets shed light on the lives of famed artists and decode their practices, while adding new layers of intrigue to celebrated masterpieces.
Beauty is pain. Elizabeth Siddal, one of art history’s most famous muses, had intimate experience with this adage. Siddal first met artist Walter Deverell in 1849, the year she turned 20, while working for a London milliner and soon became a favored model of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood artists. She was featured in William Holman Hunt’s A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids (1849–50) and most famously in John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1851–52). It was during her contribution to the latter painting, that she fell ill.
Beauty was a matter of pain for Millais, too. In a rare move for artists of the era, he spent five months painting scenery for Ophelia in a hut along Surrey’s Hogsmill River. “My martyrdom is more trying than any I have hitherto experienced,” Millais remarked, describing “muscular” flies and powerful winds. “The painting of a picture under such circumstances would be a greater punishment to a murderer than hanging.”
The Tate notes that Millais devoted only four months to portraying Ophelia herself. Siddal agreed to stand in for the doomed beauty. She spent long hours in a bathtub at the artist’s Gower Street studio, wearing a cheap gown Millais acquired. “Today I have purchased a really splendid lady’s ancient dress—all flowered over in silver embroidery,” he wrote. “It cost me, old and dirty as it is, four pounds.” The dress is still in the Tate.
Millais arranged oil lamps beneath Siddall’s tub to keep her bathwater warm. One of those lamps went out. Millais didn’t notice, and Siddal didn’t complain—by then she knew that beauty means pain. The water grew so frigid that Siddall fell ill with pneumonia. Siddall’s father ordered Millais to cover her extensive medical bills. The artist allegedly made off paying the least possible amount.
Siddal in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Lady Lilith (1866–68; 1872–73). Collection of the Delaware Art Museum.
Siddal made a full recovery from her Ophelia-induced illness, but the bout proved foreshadowing. Siddall likely met Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti while they both sat for Deverell’s massive oil painting Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene IV (1850). Siddall fell for Rossetti, who made her his sole model. In 1853, Rossetti took Siddall on as an art student. He taught her to draw, and advised her to drop the last letter from her surname. By 1857, Siddal became one of the only women to exhibit alongside the Pre-Raphaelites. Over the next 15 years, she produced numerous drawings, paintings, and poems, often inspired by Lord Tennyson, her favorite poet since discovering his verses on a butter wrapping as a kid.
As time wore on, Siddal grew fearful that her philandering beau would abandon her for a younger muse. While Rossetti resisted their marriage due to Siddal’s working class background, the two wed in 1860. It wasn’t enough to stave off her consumptive melancholy. Siddal died from a laudanum overdose, a rumored suicide, in 1862—decades before 1894, when Ophelia was included the original Henry Tate gift. It’s one of the museum’s most popular paintings today, due in no small part to Siddal’s sublime beauty, the pain it brought her.
Follow Artnet News on Facebook:
Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward.
/* OOVVUU Targeting */
const path = ‘/news/canada’;
const siteName = ‘thestar.com’;
let domain = ‘thestar.com’;
if (siteName === ‘thestar.com’)
domain = ‘thestar.com’;
else if (siteName === ‘niagarafallsreview.ca’)
domain = ‘niagara_falls_review’;
else if (siteName === ‘stcatharinesstandard.ca’)
domain = ‘st_catharines_standard’;
else if (siteName === ‘thepeterboroughexaminer.com’)
domain = ‘the_peterborough_examiner’;
else if (siteName === ‘therecord.com’)
domain = ‘the_record’;
else if (siteName === ‘thespec.com’)
domain = ‘the_spec’;
else if (siteName === ‘wellandtribune.ca’)
domain = ‘welland_tribune’;
else if (siteName === ‘bramptonguardian.com’)
domain = ‘brampton_guardian’;
else if (siteName === ‘caledonenterprise.com’)
domain = ‘caledon_enterprise’;
else if (siteName === ‘cambridgetimes.ca’)
domain = ‘cambridge_times’;
else if (siteName === ‘durhamregion.com’)
domain = ‘durham_region’;
else if (siteName === ‘guelphmercury.com’)
domain = ‘guelph_mercury’;
else if (siteName === ‘insidehalton.com’)
domain = ‘inside_halton’;
else if (siteName === ‘insideottawavalley.com’)
domain = ‘inside_ottawa_valley’;
else if (siteName === ‘mississauga.com’)
domain = ‘mississauga’;
else if (siteName === ‘muskokaregion.com’)
domain = ‘muskoka_region’;
else if (siteName === ‘newhamburgindependent.ca’)
domain = ‘new_hamburg_independent’;
else if (siteName === ‘niagarathisweek.com’)
domain = ‘niagara_this_week’;
else if (siteName === ‘northbaynipissing.com’)
domain = ‘north_bay_nipissing’;
else if (siteName === ‘northumberlandnews.com’)
domain = ‘northumberland_news’;
else if (siteName === ‘orangeville.com’)
domain = ‘orangeville’;
else if (siteName === ‘ourwindsor.ca’)
domain = ‘our_windsor’;
else if (siteName === ‘parrysound.com’)
domain = ‘parrysound’;
else if (siteName === ‘simcoe.com’)
domain = ‘simcoe’;
else if (siteName === ‘theifp.ca’)
domain = ‘the_ifp’;
else if (siteName === ‘waterloochronicle.ca’)
domain = ‘waterloo_chronicle’;
else if (siteName === ‘yorkregion.com’)
domain = ‘york_region’;
let sectionTag = ”;
try
if (domain === ‘thestar.com’ && path.indexOf(‘wires/’) = 0)
sectionTag = ‘/business’;
else if (path.indexOf(‘/autos’) >= 0)
sectionTag = ‘/autos’;
else if (path.indexOf(‘/entertainment’) >= 0)
sectionTag = ‘/entertainment’;
else if (path.indexOf(‘/life’) >= 0)
sectionTag = ‘/life’;
else if (path.indexOf(‘/news’) >= 0)
sectionTag = ‘/news’;
else if (path.indexOf(‘/politics’) >= 0)
sectionTag = ‘/politics’;
else if (path.indexOf(‘/sports’) >= 0)
sectionTag = ‘/sports’;
else if (path.indexOf(‘/opinion’) >= 0)
sectionTag = ‘/opinion’;
} catch (ex)
const descriptionUrl = ‘window.location.href’;
const vid = ‘mediainfo.reference_id’;
const cmsId = ‘2665777’;
let url = `https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/ads?iu=/58580620/$domain/video/oovvuu$sectionTag&description_url=$descriptionUrl&vid=$vid&cmsid=$cmsId&tfcd=0&npa=0&sz=640×480&ad_rule=0&gdfp_req=1&output=vast&unviewed_position_start=1&env=vp&impl=s&correlator=`;
url = url.split(‘ ‘).join(”);
window.oovvuuReplacementAdServerURL = url;
TORONTO – The union representing hundreds of striking Art Gallery of Ontario workers says it’s reached a tentative deal with the museum.
The Ontario Public Service Employees Union says they reached the deal late last night, after 16 hours of bargaining.
Already a Subscriber? Sign in
You are logged in
function buildUserSwitchAccountsForm()
var form = document.getElementById(‘user-local-logout-form-switch-accounts’);
if (form) return;
// build form with javascript since having a form element here breaks the payment modal.
var switchForm = document.createElement(‘form’);
switchForm.setAttribute(‘id’,’user-local-logout-form-switch-accounts’);
switchForm.setAttribute(‘method’,’post’);
switchForm.setAttribute(‘action’,’https://www.thestar.com/tncms/auth/logout/?return=https://www.thestar.com/users/login/?referer_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thestar.com%2Fnews%2Fcanada%2Fstriking-art-gallery-of-ontario-workers-reach-tentative-deal-with-museum%2Farticle_f93dfb4a-141d-5144-bb61-41d842fc7153.html’);
switchForm.setAttribute(‘style’,’display:none;’);
var refUrl = document.createElement(‘input’); //input element, text
refUrl.setAttribute(‘type’,’hidden’);
refUrl.setAttribute(‘name’,’referer_url’);
refUrl.setAttribute(‘value’,’https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/striking-art-gallery-of-ontario-workers-reach-tentative-deal-with-museum/article_f93dfb4a-141d-5144-bb61-41d842fc7153.html’);
var submit = document.createElement(‘input’);
submit.setAttribute(‘type’,’submit’);
submit.setAttribute(‘name’,’logout’);
submit.setAttribute(‘value’,’Logout’);
switchForm.appendChild(refUrl);
switchForm.appendChild(submit);
document.getElementsByTagName(‘body’)[0].appendChild(switchForm);
function handleUserSwitchAccounts()
window.sessionStorage.removeItem(‘bd-viafoura-oidc’); // clear viafoura JWT token
// logout user before sending them to login page via return url
document.getElementById(‘user-local-logout-form-switch-accounts’).submit();
return false;
buildUserSwitchAccountsForm();
console.log(‘=====> bRemoveLastParagraph: ‘,0);
The union representing hundreds of striking Art Gallery of Ontario workers says it’s reached a tentative deal with the museum.
The Ontario Public Service Employees Union says they reached the deal late last night, after 16 hours of bargaining.
The downtown Toronto museum has been closed for a month while more than 400 workers represented by OPSEU – including assistant curators, archivists and food and hospitality staff – were on strike.
They walked off the job after rejecting an offer from the AGO, which the union said failed to address key issues such as wage increases, protections for part-time workers and contracting out positions.
The union didn’t share details about their new tentative deal, which will soon go to a vote among the members, and the AGO did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
No information was immediately available about when the AGO would reopen.
The union has previously said that part-time employees make up more than 60 per cent of the AGO’s work force, and they earn an average of $34,380 per year.
Politics1 min ago
Haiti Prime Minister Ariel Henry resigns, transitional council takes power – Al Jazeera English
Business24 mins ago
Honda’s $15B Ontario EV plant marks ‘historic day,’ Trudeau says – Global News
Media28 mins ago
Opinion | The Media Say Crime Is Going Down. Don't Believe It – The Wall Street Journal
Investment4 years ago
Silver investment demand jumped 12% in 2019
Media11 months ago
12 Bizarre Things People Did Just To Make Social Media Content
3 years ago
Global Media Markets, 2015-2020, 2020-2025F, 2030F – TV and Radio Broadcasting, Film and Music, Information Services, Web Content, Search Portals And Social Media, Print Media, & Cable – GlobeNewswire
-
Media19 hours ago
B.C. online harms bill on hold after deal with social media firms
-
Media24 hours ago
Trump poised to clinch US$1.3-billion social media company stock award
-
Real eState20 hours ago
Montreal tenant forced to pay his landlord’s taxes offers advice to other renters
-
Investment20 hours agoMOF: Govt to establish high-level facilitation platform to oversee potential, approved strategic investments
-
Politics19 hours ago
Politics Briefing: Younger demographics not swayed by federal budget benefits targeted at them, poll indicates
-
News19 hours ago
Just bought a used car? There’s a chance it’s stolen, as thieves exploit weakness in vehicle registrations
-
Science19 hours ago
Giant prehistoric salmon had tusk-like spikes used for defence, building nests: study
-
Tech18 hours ago
Calgary woman who neglected elderly father spared jail term
