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B.C. man transforms old instruments into eye-catching art – Global News

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A Vancouver Island man is repurposing broken instruments into work of art, transforming items once meant to please the ear into sculptures that treat the eye.

It’s another busy day in the backyard studio for Douglas Walker, where he is assembling intricate pieces into a bigger puzzle.



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That sometimes means dipping into the saxophone stash. Or maybe adding a trumpet and trombone.

“You just sit and make stuff out of other stuff,” Walker told Global’s This is BC.

Walker says his career took off once he brought the brass section into his creations.

“There was a point about three to five years into it when I said, I really have something here,” Walker said.

He’s evolved from making small, simple fountains to sophisticated water-driven mechanics, learning how to craft all these metal parts into an artistic masterpiece on the fly.

“I go to antique stores and Value Village and I pick up brass and silver and solder them together,” Walker explained. “A lot of pieces aren’t meant to be soldered together.”



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New ideas are arriving all the time, with Walker drawing inspiration from something as simple as a weed and then breathing new life into old wind instruments.

“School bands have stuff in their storage closet taking up space that they don’t use anymore,” Walker said.

He buys his materials from a network of suppliers, including a go-to repair shop in Wisconsin.

“I can call them up and say I need ten trombones or I need three or four saxophones and he’ll box them,” he explained.

Walker has made close to 5,000 sculptures over the course of his 20-year career, with sales and installations all over the world.



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“I’ve gone from a craftsperson to what I would call someone working with fine art,” Walker said. “This world really inspires me. I’m just so fortunate to see it that way.”

Never short on creativity, Walker says can come up with some of the most unique designs to satisfy any collector.

“I don’t have to sit and sketch and think and dream and stuff,” Walker said. “I just have to sit down with a torch and make stuff and ideas just happen.”

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40 Random Bits of Trivia About Artists and the Artsy Art That They Articulate – Cracked.com

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40 Random Bits of Trivia About Artists and the Artsy Art That They Articulate  Cracked.com



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John Little, whose paintings showed the raw side of Montreal, dies at 96 – CBC.ca

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John Little, whose paintings showed the raw side of Montreal, dies at 96  CBC.ca



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A misspelled memorial to the Brontë sisters gets its dots back at last

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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.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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