When Claire Jones stepped into the apartment of her husband’s late uncle for the first time, she discovered what looked like the trappings of a carnival.
Art
BFA student's art speaks for itself | The Journal – Queen's Journal
BFA student Johanna Schaly resists giving her artwork too much meaning. Instead, she lets it speak for itself.
Schaly is pursuing Fine Arts through the concurrent education stream and is currently in her fourth year at Queen’s. She’ll graduate from her undergrad in the Bachelor of Fine Arts program in ’21, then from ConEd in ’22. She spoke to The Journal in a phone interview about her artistic goals and motivations.
The artist has always had a fascination with art supplies, but she never knew how to use any of them properly. She grew up homeschooled by her mother, who didn’t know much about art. Because she had no access to formal training at the time, she started experimenting on her own.
In grade nine, Schaly started to take her artwork seriously. At Moira (now called Eastside) Secondary School in Belleville, she was finally able to take art classes each year, where she learned technical skills and dabbled in different mediums.
Taking as many art classes as her school would allow—a total of five over her four years of high school—Schaly took what she learned and headed off to Kingston with her newfound abilities.
Her favourite medium, and the one she works with most often, is printmaking.
“My prints always start out with something that I see or I think is cool. For instance, one of my prints was a picture of the tops of some houses and trees that I saw on my way to campus in the fall,” Schaly said. “It’s my [favourite] because of the colours, and it feels harmonious.”
The art student doesn’t start making a piece with a set message or purpose in mind. Rather, she makes art because she loves the process.
Photo by: Jodie Grieve
“I create to play with the feeling of actually making art itself, then once I’ve created the piece, I consider [it] to be a by-product of my process,” Schaly said. “I encourage viewers […] to come up with their own meaning because I want them to feel whatever they feel from the art. There’s no right answer with what I’m trying to do.”
Schaly finds inspiration from other artists on Instagram and Pinterest, though she doesn’t think her work mirrors or mimics anyone else’s. After taking art history classes over the past four years, she’s seen pieces that have sparked her interest, like work by the art collective Guerrilla Girls, but she doesn’t relate specifically to anyone else’s style.
“I don’t connect to a single artists’ body of work. I’m excited though, because I know someday I will connect to a single artist’s body of work, but that day hasn’t happened yet. I haven’t found the right person.”
Through her fine art studies at Queen’s, Schaly has learned a lot about her preferences and her limitations as an artist. She was forced to face this when she took a painting class teaching still-life skills early on in her studies.
“I will never perform and create the way that my peers will and the way that my profs would expect me to,” Schaly said. “I almost failed the class because, for the life of me, I could not create a copy of [a painting.]”
Schaly says that although this was challenging at the time, and her grades suffered for it, she’s at a point in her life and artistic career where she no longer cares about those boundaries. She knows where her strengths lie, and she knows what kind of art she wants to make.
“I’ve reached a point where I’ve put in my time of being told what to do, and now it’s time for me to do what I want to do.”
Since that realization, the artist has made linoleum and wood prints in her house. By carving images and shapes into the linoleum or wood, inking them, and then rolling them onto paper, she’s able to make her art without the need for studio space or professional equipment. This reminds Schaly of when she first fell in love with print making in her first high school art classes.
“I’m trying to get back to that and explore that process using the knowledge and skills that I’ve build through my art education.”
In the future, Schaly sees herself returning to the classroom as an elementary school teacher. After graduating from ConEd in 2022, Schaly believes that one day in the future, she’ll be teaching art to her students.
“I know that somewhere in my life, I’m going to end up being an art teacher. It’s just the nature of having this skillset,” she said.
“I want to take my work into the classroom to show students that you can create something meaningful, without knowing what it is you’re trying to say.”
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Next up in our IGN First coverage of Eternal Strands, we’re diving into the unique and colorful art in the land of the Enclave. We sat down with art director Sebastien Primeau and lead character artist Stephanie Chafe to ask them all about it.
IGN: Let’s talk about Eternal Strands’ distinctive art style. What were some of the guiding principles behind the art direction?
Primeau: I think what was guiding the art direction at the beginning of the project was to find the scale of the game, because we knew that we were having those gigantic 25-meter tall creatures and monsters. So we really wanted to have the architectural elements of the game – the vegetation, the trees – to reflect that kind of size.
So one of my inspirations was coming from an architect called Hugh Ferriss, and I was very impressed by his work, and it was very inspiring for me too. So just the scale of his work. So he was a real influence for Metropolis, Gotham, so I was really inspired by his work.
Chafe: I think one of the things that, just as artists and as creators, we were interested in as well was going for a color palette that can be very bright. And something that can really challenge us too as artists, and going into a bit more of at-hand painterly work, and getting our hands really into it, into the clay, so to speak, and trying to go for something bright and colorful.
IGN: That’s not the first time I’ve heard your team describe the art style as “painterly.” What does that mean?
Primeau: Painterly is just a word that can give so much room to different types of interpretation. I think where we started was Impressionist painters. So I really enjoy looking at many painters, and they have different types of styles. But we wanted to have something that was fresh, colorful, and unique.
And also, I remember when we were starting the project there was that word. “It’s going to be stylized,” but stylized is just a word that gives so much room to different kinds of style. And since we were a small team, we had to figure out a way to create those rough brushstrokes. If it was painted very quickly by an artist, like Bob Ross would say, “Accident is normal.” So I think we wanted to embrace that. And because we’re all artists, it’s hard too, at some point, to disconnect from what you’re doing. It’s like, “Oh, I can maybe add some more details over there.” But I was always the- “Guys, oh, Steph, that’s enough. Let’s stop it right there. I think it looks cool.”
IGN: So, when you create an asset for Eternal Strands, is somebody actually painting something?
Chafe: I can speak more on the character side. For us, we do a lot of that hand painting, a lot of those strokes by hand. And we try to embrace, not the mistakes, but the non-realistic part of it having an extra splotch here and there.
We’ve got brushes that we made that can help us as artists to get the texture we’re looking for. It really is a texture that gives to it. But a lot of the time it’s not just something generated in a substance painter, or getting these things that will layer these things for you, making it quick and procedural. Sometimes we have those as helpers, but more often than not we just go in and paint.
IGN: Eternal Strands is a fair bit more colorful than lots of games today. Why was it important to the team to have lots of bright colors?
Primeau: You need to be careful, actually, with colors. Because with too many colors you can create that kind of pizza of color.
We wanted to balance the color per level, because we’re not making an open-world game. I really wanted each level to have their own color palette identity. So we’re playing a lot with the lighting. The lighting for me is key. It’s very important. You can have gorgeous textures, props, characters, but if your lighting is not that great, it’s like… So lighting is key. And especially with Unreal Five, we have now, access to Lumen. It brought so much richness to the color, how the color is balancing with the entirety of the level. It definitely changed the way we were looking at the game.
We’re using the technology, but in a way to create something that feels like if you were looking at a painting. I think we have achieved that goal.
Chafe: I’m very happy with it.
IGN: What were your inspirations from other games or other media when developing the art style?
Primeau: I have many. I’ll start with graphic novels, European graphic novels. I really wanted to stay away from DC comics, Marvels comics, those kinds of classics.
Before I started Eternal Strand, I saw a video. It was one of the League of Legends short films for a competition. It’s “RISE.” I don’t know if you remember that one, but it was made by Fortiche Studio who did Arcane, and I’m a huge fan of Arcane. When I saw that short film, it was way before Arcane was announced, I was like, “oh gosh, this is freaking cool. This is so amazing. I wish I would be able to work on a game that has that kind of look.”
Chafe: For me, when we started the project, one of the things that I wanted to challenge myself a lot was in concept and drawing and stuff like that and doing more, learning more about color as well, which is something I find super fascinating and also kicks my butt all the time because of just color theory in general.
But with the [character] portraits specifically, I think, I mean, growing up I played a lot of games, a lot of JRPGs too. I played just seeing basic portraits in something like Golden Sun or eventually also Persona and of course Hades, which is a fantastic game. I played way too much of that, early access included. But I really liked that part. Visual novels too, just that kind of thing. You can get an emotion from a 2D image as well when it’s well done, especially if you have voices on top of it.
IGN: Were there any really influential pieces of concept art that served as a guiding document the team would reference later on?
Chafe: I have one personal: It’s really Maxime Desmettre’s stuff because it was so saturated. Blue, blue, blue sky. Maxim Desmettre is our concept artist that we have who works from Korea. When I joined the project, seeing that was just like… and seeing that as a challenge too, like ‘how are we going to get there?’
The one that I’m thinking of that hopefully we could find after, just in general with the work that always speaks so much to me is this blue, blue sky and the saturation of the grass. But also when he gets into his architecture and stuff like that, there’s just a warmth to everything. The warmth to the stone that just makes it look inviting and mysterious at the same time. And I think that really speaks a lot to it.
IGN: How did you go about designing Eternal Strand’s protagonist: Brynn?
Primeau: I think that Mike also, when he pitched me the character, he was using Indiana Jones as an example. So courageous, adventurer guy, cool guy. Also, when you’re looking at Indiana Jones, he’s a cool guy. And we wanted to create that kind of coolness also out of our main protagonist. And I remember it took time. We did many iterations.
Chafe: It was a lot of iterations for sure. Well, I think I had done a bunch of sketches because it’s what’s going to be the face of the player, and also to have her own personality as well in the story, and her history as well. And the mantle was a really big one too. What gives her one of sets of her powers and stuff, figuring that out was actually one of the longest processes. It’s just a cape, but at the same time, it’s getting that to work with gameplay and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, all of Brynn’s personality and her vibe really comes from a lot of good work from the narrative team. So, mostly collaboration there.
IGN: What’s the deal with Brynn’s mentor: Oria? How did you settle on a giant bird?
Chafe: Populating the world of the enclave was, “it’s free real estate.” You get to just throw things on the wall and see what sticks. And, “Oh, that’s really cool. Oh, that’s nice.” At some point I’d done a big sketch of a big bird lady with a claymore, and Seb said, “That’s cool.” And then kind of ran with it.
IGN: What’s the toughest part about the art style you’ve chosen for Eternal Strands?
Primeau: The toughest part was…A lot of people in the team have experience making games, so it was to get outside of that mold that we’ve been to.
For me, working on games that were more realistic in terms of look, I think it was really tough just to think differently, to change our mindset, especially that we knew that we would be a small team, so we had to do the art differently, find recipes, especially when we were talking about textures, for example. So having a good mix.
Chafe: One of the things too is also as we’re all a bunch of artists, and every artist has their own style that they just suddenly have ingrained in them, and that’s what makes us all unique as artists as well. But when you’re on a project, you have to coalesce together. You can’t kind of have one look different from the other. When you’re doing something more realistic, you have your North Star, which is a giant load of references that are real. And you can say “it has to look like that, as close to that as possible.”
When you have a style in mind and you’re developing at the same time, you kind of look at it and you review it and you have a feeling more than anything else.
You’re training each other with your styles as you kind of merge together in the end. And that kind of is how the style happened through, like you mentioned, like finding easy recipes, through just actually creating assets and seeing what comes out and, “Oh, that’s really cool. Okay, we can now use that as kind of our North Star.”
For more on Eternal Strands, check out our preview of the Ark of the Forge boss fight, or read our interview with the founders of Yellow Brick Games on going from AAA studios to their own indie shop, and for everything else stick with IGN.
Saanich police are investigating the theft of a large collection of First Nations art valued at more than $60,000 from a Gordon Head home.
The theft happened on April 2.
The collection includes several pieces by Whitehorse-based artist Calvin Morberg, as well as Inuit carvings estimated to be more than 60 years old.
Anyone with information on the thef is asked to call Saanich police at 250-472-4321.
jbell@timescolonist.com
A giant concrete sculpture of a roaring lion’s head stood in the living room, enveloping the fireplace. Looming in the next room was a giant Minotaur head. Papier-mâché sculptures littered the hallways and colorful murals adorned every wall and ceiling, even in the bathroom.
Jones and her family had known Ron Gittins as an eccentric and solitary artist. But they hadn’t realized until shortly after he died in 2019 at age 79 that he had carved, sculpted and painted his passion onto the walls of his rented apartment in Birkenhead, a riverside town in northwestern England where he lived alone.
It couldn’t stay, Gittins’s landlord had said. But Jones knew she wanted to preserve the scene.
“I was just kind of like, ‘We can’t just let this go,’” she told The Washington Post.
For years, Gittins’s family worked to protect his whimsical life’s work, insisting that the apartment, “Ron’s Place,” was an irreplaceable art installation worthy of preservation. This month, the British government agreed. Historic England, a national body that designates historically significant sites in England, added Ron’s Place to its National Heritage List, the family announced in early April.
The designation, which forbids an owner from making changes to Ron’s Place without governmental consent, places Gittins’s apartment among the ranks of the medieval churches and Victorian villas that usually receive such recognition in the country, securing an unlikely legacy for Gittins’s creation. The apartment received a Grade II listing, which is given to “particularly important buildings of more than special interest,” according to Historic England.
“This was Ron, who led a very small, private life,” said Paul Kelly, a board member of the Wirral Arts and Culture Community Land Trust, an organization created to manage Ron’s Place. “Suddenly, he was being recognized as having done something of interest on that scale. … What an extraordinary thing.”
Gittins, a self-employed artist and theater performer, was an outcast of sorts among his family, his niece Jan Williams wrote to The Post. He showed up at reunions in flamboyant outfits and spoke in codes, joking that he was a secret agent. He was known in Birkenhead as the local eccentric who sometimes strutted around town dressed as a Roman centurion.
He was, Williams said, “colorful, larger than life, loud, opinionated, argumentative yet affectionate.”
Gittins kept his family at a distance. He let few people into his apartment, which his rental agreement had permitted him to decorate “to his own taste,” according to the Ron’s Place website.
Walking into Gittins’s home after his death felt like finally discovering the world he’d been inhabiting, Williams said. The lion’s head glistened with eyes made from shards of glass, and a frying pan sat in its mouth. Strewn around the apartment were smaller models, like an Egyptian sarcophagus that opened up to reveal a model mummy. While sorting through Gittins’s possessions, Williams found a postcard he had written addressed to her, saying that he couldn’t wait to show her his creations.
“Ron had created a fantasy world for his own pleasure,” Williams said. “A sort of stage set where he played the leading role.”
Williams, herself an artist and photographer, led the effort to save Gittins’s apartment. She first arranged to keep renting the apartment from his landlord, fundraising to cover the cost and forming a community organization to manage the space. Endorsements trickled in from singers, authors and sculptors who visited Ron’s Place at the family’s invitation. They landed a story in the Guardian and a video feature from the BBC.
In November 2022, the building that housed Ron’s Place was put up for auction. Buyers circled, and Williams scrambled to raise the hundreds of thousands of dollars they needed to win a bidding war. It ended in a “fairytale-style” miracle, Williams said: On March 1, 2023, the last day of the auction, a donor emailed with an offer to lend Williams’s organization most of the money it needed to purchase the building for about $400,000. The donor told Williams she had learned about Ron’s Place that morning, while reading the newspaper on her commute.
“It felt as if it was meant to be,” Williams said.
In a Hail Mary bid to delay the sale, Williams had also petitioned Historic England to list Ron’s Place as historically significant. It was a long shot — the designation is normally given to churches, inns and manors with centuries’ more history than Gittins’s apartment.
Historic England, however, heeded her request, even after Williams and the land trust secured ownership of Ron’s Place. When Sarah Charlesworth, an evaluator with Historic England, visited the apartment later that year, she immediately noticed the same floor-to-ceiling lion statue that had greeted Williams and Jones years earlier.
“I was actually thinking ‘This is a slam dunk’ as soon as I came in,” Charlesworth said.
Ron’s Place seemed to her like a striking example of “outsider art” — artwork created by people with no formal artistic training and without the intention of being exhibited or sold. It was, Charlesworth said, a facet of Britain’s history just as worthy of preservation as its churches and castles.
“Listing is not just about stately homes and chocolate box cottages,” she said. “It is about being representative and inclusive and making sure that we do represent all aspects of the nation’s history.”
The apartment is closed to visitors as it undergoes repairs. Williams and Kelly, the Wirral Arts and Culture Community Land Trust board member, said the organization has plans after acquiring the entire building that houses Ron’s Place, which also includes a garden and three upstairs apartments. They hope to preserve Gittins’s artwork on the ground floor as a museum and art space and renovate the other apartments into low-cost housing units for artists.
It’s an unlikely legacy for Gittins after devoting much of his life to the secret world in his apartment, Kelly said. But he thinks Gittins would be pleased to see others taking notice.
“Ron was a real outsider,” Kelly said. “But … this has been recognition for his work. He would be loving it.”
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