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
Local artists, creatives gearing up for Saturday's National Arts Drive – OrilliaMatters
Nominations are now open for the Orillia Regional Arts and Heritage Awards.
This newly combined evening of feting local arts and heritage champs is going full steam ahead even in these still pandemic times. The show will go on, whether virtually or in person, on Nov. 25 at a location to be announced.
Nominations are being accepted in five categories, and the winners in each category will be picked by a jury selected for that purpose.
The five categories are:
- Education in Arts, Culture and Heritage;
- Emerging Artist;
- Heritage: Restoration, Renovation and Publication;
- Event in Arts, Culture and Heritage; and
- Qennefer Browne Achievement Award.
Anyone may nominate a person, event, publication, or group of people in the categories, and there is also a nomination committee, new this year, who will be available to help support nominations and help nominators. No self-nominations, please. All nominations will be submitted via an online portal. Nominations will close Oct. 2, 2020.
The Orillia Regional Arts and Heritage Awards is a joint presentation of the Orillia District Arts Council and the Orillia Museum of Art and History. The awards are proudly sponsored by Accutrac Capital and the City of Orillia. For more details and to nominate, please click here.
Speaking of the Orillia District Arts Council, that organization is also the local co-organizer of the National Arts Drive, which is coming up this Saturday from 4 to 7 p.m.
This is a Canada-wide event, to facilitate supporting the arts during this pandemic. Artists, musicians, cultural institutions, and restaurants can register and put a pin in their location and drivers can register and receive a map with all participants in their area located on it, to facilitate a driving creatives tour in their area.
During the tour, drivers can view the work outside and inside, talk to the creatives, visit their websites, and/or buy works of art either online or safely in the artists’ studios.
In our area, Hobo Jam, many Peter Street and ODAC and OFFA artists and galleries, Creative Nomad Studios, and more are participating.
RAW Artists is the global independent arts organization which is spearheading this event across our nation and invites you to join in. You can find out more details and register as a driver, here.
The Orillia Museum of Art and History’s (OMAH) online art auction is still going strong, with new works of art being added each week. All proceeds from this auction go toward operating costs and OMAH. You can buy a piece you like outright for $30 or start your bidding at $15 and see if you win. To view the works and bid on your selection, click here.
Another arts event which is helping arts patrons who are missing out on our usual events, is the virtual Art Under the Pavilion video tour, organized by Paul Baxter.
Baxter is the long-time organizer of Art Under the Pavilion, usually taking place on the second weekend in June and the second weekend in August, in conjunction with the big waterfront festivals at the Port of Orillia. Art Under the Pavilion showcased local artists and their work, under the big pavilion by the water in Couchiching Beach Park.
Of course, this year, both these events are cancelled and there was to be no Art Under the Pavilion. Baxter decided to take matters into his own hands, and has helped put a lovely video together, to showcase the many different Art Under the Pavilions that took place over the years. Click here to watch and enjoy this online Art Under the Pavilion. Until next year!
Creative Nomad Studios 2020 Unlimited Juried art show is still ongoing, in the windows of Creative Nomad Studios, at 23 Mississaga St. W. Lots of beautiful art to check out as you stroll by, and it is all for sale. Creative Nomad is also hosting an online store for various downtown merchants and artists, through the Creative Nomad website. Check out all the 2020 Unlimited artworks here.
The downtown Orillia merchants and artists’ work can be found here.
The Essential Concert series this week features Steven Henry, Thurs. June 17 starting at 8 p.m. This is a weekly concert series in support of the Soldiers’ Memorial Hospital Foundation. To enjoy this wonderfully talented musician, tune in here.
More arts news next week, and don’t forget to send me yours, to annaproctor111@gmail.com.
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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.”
Art
PARIS RESTAURANT PLÉNITUDE IS REVEALED AS THE RECIPIENT OF THE ART OF HOSPITALITY AWARD 2024 … – Yahoo Canada Finance
Announced in advance of the awards ceremony for the first time ever, this accolade seeks to help raise the profile of the art of hospitality
LONDON, April 18, 2024 /CNW/ — Paris restaurant Plénitude is revealed as the recipient of the Art of Hospitality Award 2024 from The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, ahead of the official ceremony taking place in Las Vegas in June.
Located on the first floor of the French capital’s Cheval Blanc Paris, Chef Arnaud Donckele and Director Alexandre Larvoir have created in Plénitude an ode to the tradition of French fine dining, spending two years choosing the crockery, artisans, ceramicist and fabrics that help to create the restaurant’s intimate ambiance. With just 30 covers, every detail delivers an intimate experience for its diners, complete with the restaurant’s signature French elegance.
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Normandy-born Chef Donckele, who also runs Cheval Blanc Saint-Tropez fine dining restaurant La Vague d’Or, has taken on the role of master perfumer in his creations to make sauces, known as the essence of French cuisine. In his hands, each is treated like a perfume or liquid painting, created such that the sauces are the main event, with meat and fish as their complements. Under the leadership of Larvoir, the restaurant’s impeccable service team knows Donckele’s creations intimately and conveys their essence to guests stepping through the door of Cheval Blanc Paris, which was placed at No.34 on The World’s 50 Best Hotels 2023.
William Drew, Director of Content for The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, says: “We are thrilled to announce Plénitude as the winner of this year’s Art of Hospitality Award. Despite its relative youth, this Paris restaurant has been making waves on the global gastronomy scene for its flawless and inventive approach, celebrating the art of service and showing the world that French hospitality remains at the top of its game.”
Chef Donckele says: “Give yourself the pleasure of giving pleasure.” Larvoir adds: “At Plénitude, service is a wonderful encounter at every table. We seek to welcome our guests as if they were at home, to discover and understand them, to captivate and move them thanks to Arnaud’s fabulous sauces, to make them laugh too, before leaving them with the sincere wish to see them again soon.”
Photo – https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2388561/50_Best_Paris_restaurant_Plenitude.jpg
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View original content to download multimedia: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/April2024/18/c5640.html
Art
Canada's art installation at Venice Biennale rooted in research, history, beauty – Hamilton Spectator
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Hundreds of thousands of tiny glass beads will soon be twinkling in the sun across the entire Canadian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Canada’s newly revealed entry in one of the world’s most prestigious art fairs.
But Kapwani Kiwanga, the Hamilton-born, Paris-based creator of the work, wants you to get past the cobalt blue glass glinting in the Venetian light. She wants you to think of each bead as a character.
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