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Chalk art fundraiser, world record attempt brightens Beechwood Cemetery – CBC.ca

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Over 100 people — including nearby residents, artists and volunteers — put chalk to asphalt at Beechwood Cemetery over the weekend in an effort to beat a Guinness World Record for the largest display of pavement chalk art.

The current record for the largest chalk display is held by a health insurance company called Novitas BKK in a small town in Itzehoe, Germany. They created 944 chalk drawings in 2019.

Nick McCarthy, Beechwood Cemetery’s director of marketing communications, wanted Ottawa to reach 1,000.

“We’ll be very proud to say that we had a Guinness World Record attempt or a win,” McCarthy said.

If Beechwood Cemetery doesn’t meet the mark for world’s largest display of chalk art, McCarthy says it can still win for largest art display in a cemetery. (Celeste Decaire/CBC)

Although vying for the title, McCarthy said the effort is about more than just breaking a world record. The overall theme behind Sunday’s art display was community.

“Not only an opportunity for the community to come together, but an opportunity for the community to celebrate each other, to honour each other, to honour the sacrifices.” McCarthy said.

Sarah Laviolette and her daughter Olive Hammell regularly visit the cemetery for their cousin and grandfather, who are buried in the military section of the grounds.

For them, the chalk art fundraiser was a chance to take their artistic backgrounds to a space known for grieving, and make it a little brighter.

‘We were originally just going to the store. Then mom said, oh, we should go to the cemetery. And I said, OK, let’s go to the cemetery. And now I’m here drawing,’ Olive Hammell, 14, says. (Celeste Decaire/CBC)

“I think cemeteries are very misunderstood and having the kids out here drawing … it really just warms my heart,” Laviolette said.

Her daughter agrees.

“Most people just think of cemeteries as (depressing) … but it’s nice when it’s more of a family experience,” Hammell said. “You are there to visit friends and family, whether they’re here or not.”

If you think about it right, not everything is permanent, and in this case you have this beautiful art that will be here and gone, very much like a lot of us.– Nick McCarthy, Beechwood Cemetery

Hammell’s chalk illustration started as a circle and turned into an anime portrait about half an hour later. She said she captured the theme of community through the colours she chose to work with.

“All the colours are working together to create one art piece. Some of them may have different contrasts to each other, but they still work together,” Hammell said.

By McCarthy’s rough count, over 500 chalk drawings decorated the cemetery grounds by late afternoon. While Beechwood can conduct its own final tally, a submission and review by Guinness can take anywhere from 12 weeks to six months.

With rain in Ottawa’s forecast, hundreds of the chalk drawings may have a short stay on the grounds. Hours of effort will be washed away, but McCarthy said he doesn’t view that as a bad thing.

“If you think about it right, not everything is permanent,” he said. “In this case, you have this beautiful art that will be here and gone, very much like a lot of us.”

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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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