Grasslands Gallery Online is showing a new virtual exhibit titled “Wintering” featuring 13 contemporary Saskatchewan artists. The gallery is available for viewing until March 26.
“The world seems noisy these days,” said Laureen Marchand, gallery director and exhibition curator. “Or maybe the world is always noisy and it’s just the cumulative effect of two years of pandemic and all the controversy that who-would-have-thought would spring up around it, but here at Grasslands Gallery Online, the need for reinvigoration and peace feels strong.”
Marchand is an artist herself who has been exhibiting for 35 years. She lives in the relatively remote South Saskatchewan community of Val Marie – the gateway to Grasslands National Park.
She started the gallery as a way of exhibiting her own and others’ art throughout the pandemic. It has gone so well that she plans on continuing.
“I think it enables Saskatchewan artwork to be more widely seen.”
“The gallery started with six artists, and I’m about to launch the 14th,” Marchand said. “I’ve deliberately done it slowly, because it’s a one-woman show, and I want to do a good job for everybody.”
She said the artists are all serious, professional artists from Saskatchewan. “They live all over the province,” she said, “they’re from Prince Albert, Saskatoon, Regina, Outlook, and Val Marie.”
The gallery has become an associate member of the Saskatchewan Professional Art Galleries Association (SaskGalleries). SaskGalleries is a non-profit that gives the following guarantees for customers of their affiliates:
The gallery represents professional artists whose art practice is their full-time job;
Pays the artists properly based on standard payment principles;
Prices the art fairly and in line with national standards;
Is knowledgeable about the art and artists they carry; and
Is an established business.
Marchand is proud of the website and its presentation. “When someone clicks on a particular artwork,” she explained, “there’s an option to… see what it would look like hung in a sample room. And all the rooms are different, they’re all chosen to show off each work.”
She can truly curate her exhibitions by setting up virtual rooms. The gallery’s rooms can be “walked” through, with works shown to scale and seen in order of their arrangement.
Exhibitions also do not have the space restrictions of real-world galleries. “Wintering” features four or five artworks from each of the 13 currently-affiliated artists.
“I like this particular gallery space because it has virtual windows with virtual light coming in,” Marchand said.
When artwork is purchased, the artists ship directly from their home studios. They take care to package the purchased work professionally and are reimbursed for their shipping costs. Because the artwork is transported only once, there is a reduced use of materials, carriers, and fuel.
Marchand said the feedback from buyers so far has been unanimously positive.
The latest exhibition is curated to “bring light,” including birds, flowers, a path in a meadow, a view into space, and views into pure colour.
“My intent with ‘Wintering’ was to provide a viewing experience to kind of counter both the physical cold and the (social) noisiness of this particular winter,” Marchand explained. “The responses have been that people experience a sense of peace when they walk through the exhibition.”
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.
