The Stampede Art Show is a long running event at the greatest outdoor show on earth and artists are setting up their booths for when the gates open.
Organizers say there is always the exciting possibility the artists can sell a year’s worth of inventory in 10 days to collectors, new clients and brand new art buyers.
Curating the show takes months with each artist being evaluated early in the year by judges. Volunteer Sherri Zickefoose said it’s important to make sure the event has a little bit of everything for visitors with traditional art, but also some abstract and contemporary work to keep it fresh every year.
“Stampede and art go back to the very beginning,” said Zickefoose. “It’s a great tradition back when Stampede first started, we had the art of Charlie Russell helping our visitors really explore…that storytelling of the Wild West.”
This is Calgary artist Amanada Crozier’s first time showcasing her work and she’s thrilled about it especially after attending a number of years as a visitor.
“It’s been a dream to be here for many years and finally I reached a point where it’s like, yeah I can do this,” she said.
Crozier has learned from other artists at the show what to expect: the days are long, but they’re worth it. She’s looking forward to the interaction with Stampede visitors and says many like to hear the story behind the paintings.
“I love detail,” said Crozier. “It’s our landscape here, it’s so amazing that I want to capture that as best as I can and just show everybody what an amazing place we live in.”
‘BIGGEST SHOW IN CANADA’
Serge Dube’s studio is in Langley B.C. and this is his fifth year exhibiting his work at Stampede. He has work up and all three walls of his show space and has brought another 70 canvases because he will be working on seven new pieces a day in front of visitors.
“Well, it’s the biggest show in Canada,” he said. “There’s talent here like nowhere else, you know, yeah you can see them individually but here they all gather together.”
Dube developed his unique style 12 years ago. He doesn’t use a brush but rather manipulates paint he’s squirted on his work surface from paint bottles.
“Being here, it’s a fantastic venue for that, I have a couple of galleries around the area,” said Dube. “So a lot of the collectors and new clients, if they want something else, well they can go to the gallery so like it’s a win-win in both directions.”
Jonn Einerssen also lives in British Columbia and shares some of his Stampede event knowledge with new artists at the show because his first one was in 1988 and he remembers it well.
“It still stays fresh in my mind when I first came in, you know what, I’m 34 years now, I’m the old guy around here, I never thought that would ever happen,” he said.
He’s sold a lot of art in those years and has a few different styles that customers appreciate featuring pieces with the ocean and sky.
“I grew up in the prairies and love clouds,” Einerssen said. “That was my TV as a kid: growing up was laying on a coolie bank watching clouds.
“When I figured out I could paint them,” he added, “I thought that was pretty good so I got into quite a series of doing a lot of prairie work.”
Einerssen said it’s good to have thick skin during the Stampede Art Show because thousands of people from all different walks of life visit and don’t hesitate to share their opinions, good or bad.
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.
