Art
Ron’s Place: cash loan saves palace of outsider art at last minute – The Guardian
An extraordinary palace of outsider art secretly created in a ground-floor flat in Birkenhead has been saved after a last-minute cash loan offer from a benefactor.
Campaigners had feared the flat, known as Ron’s Place, would be stripped of its art and lost forever after the house it is in was put up for auction.
On Wednesday morning, however, the day of the sale, a message came through from a representative of the benefactor to say they would lend them the money to buy the property.
The art in the flat was created over three decades by its tenant Ron Gittins, who died in 2019. It includes vast fireplaces of a lion and a minotaur and classically inspired paintings on ceilings, walls and floors.
The plan had always been for it to be conserved and the flat used as a community resource promoting art and mental health awareness.
The aspiration was thrown into doubt when the property owner unexpectedly put it up for sale with a guide price of between £325,000 and £350,000.
After the benefactor’s intervention, it fell to the film-maker and Ron’s Place supporter Martin Wallace to take part in the online bidding process, which he won with a bid of £335,000.
“I’m feeling a little bit dazed really,” said Wallace. “I’m frazzled. To be unexpectedly bidding for a house is just absolutely surreal. We’re all sitting here in a pub having a cup of tea thinking ‘are we still asleep?’”
He praised the “outstanding generosity” of the benefactor, Tamsin Wimhurst, a social historian who with her husband, Mike Muller, runs a charitable trust. They were also responsible for saving David Parr House in Cambridge, a terraced house with remarkable arts and crafts decoration created by its ownerover 40 years.
To Wallace’s relief there was no bidding war for Ron’s Place. Campaigners had started on the process of securing listed status for the flat and its contents, and Wallace thinks that may have deterred other buyers.
When he spoke to the auctioneer’s office afterwards, he said “all of the staff there were absolutely thrilled on our behalf because it has struck a chord locally”.
Gittins’ niece Jan Williams, also an artist said she was “absolutely completely gobsmacked” that Ron’s Place had been saved. “There were times yesterday when I felt totally demoralised, and then we had to hand over the keys at 4.30pm. But then we got this message.
“We’ve had so many people fighting our corner and we are just really buoyed up by the love and support we’ve had.”
Wallace and Williams said the hard work started now. The aim of the specially created Wirral Arts and Culture Community Land Trust is not to preserve Gittins’ work for preservation sake, they say, but create a place that inspires others.
“What is noticeable is that everyone who comes here has a kind of childlike response,” Wallace said last year. “There is something fascinating and stimulating and uplifting about it … maybe something a bit sad about it as well.”
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Gittins took on the flat’s tenancy in 1986 and the agreement allowed him to decorate it in his own taste.
He rarely invited anyone in and so the discovery of that taste, after his death, was a surprise to say the least.
It is a place thatbstops visitors in their tracks. The hallway has an Egyptian tomb vibe, the front room is possibly Pompeii-inspired and in the kitchen is what seems to be a Roman altar.
The huge fearsome lion fireplace is remarkable, “unbelievable really,” Jarvis Cocker, also a Ron’s Place supporter, said.
“We can all relate to people who do their houses up. Everybody decorates their house in some way. Ron has just gone that extra mile.
“I have always been interested in the art of people who haven’t gone through the normal channels, they haven’t gone to art college and stuff like that. They have an idea and they follow it through. We all have creativity within us.”
Along with the works obsessively and painstakingly painted and sculpted on to walls and ceilings, Gittins also created papier-mache figures and costumes.
One is the uniform of a Grenadier Guard, which Gittins wore to march up and down with a papier-mache musket outside a nursing home that he was in a dispute with on behalf of his mother.
“People would find him funny, provocative, a bloody nuisance, but there was also a method to his madness,” said Wallace, who is making a feature-length documentary about Gittins and is on the advisory board of Ron’s Place.
A trio plays a cover of The Eagles hit Take it Easy as a dozen people settle in for an intimate open mic night inside Derrick McCandless and Dawn Mills’s cozy spot off highways 6 and 68 in Manitoba’s Interlake.
Strings of antique-style light bulbs cast a soft glow over the mandolin, banjo and dobro guitar that hang on a wall behind the band. An array of pottery shaped in-house by Mills dots the shelves behind the audience.
The Eriksdale Music & Custom Frame Shop is full of tchotchkes — like an Elvis Presley Boulevard street sign and vintage Orange Crush ad — that create the rustic country-living vibe the couple dreamt up before buying and transforming the vacant space over the past three years.
“I have met so many people in this community through them that I probably wouldn’t have … because of this hub,” says Mills’s cousin Dana-Jo Burdett.
Mills and McCandless are bringing people together in their rural community in more ways than one — though a return to Mills’s hometown wasn’t always in the cards.
The couple met in Winnipeg in 2011 while McCandless was playing a party at Mills’s cousin’s place. They had plans to settle in the Okanagan in McCandless’s home province of B.C. until he suffered a health scare. After that, they decided to head back to the Prairies.
WATCH | McCandless and Mills channel creative spirit into Eriksdale community:
Dawn Mills and Derrick McCandless host the RogerKimLee Music Festival in the Manitoba Interlake community of Eriksdale. They also turned a long-vacant space in town into a live music venue, instrument repair and sales store, and pottery and framing services shop.
It was the height of the pandemic in fall 2020 when the pair relocated to Eriksdale, about 130 km northwest of Winnipeg. They bought the old Big Al’s shop, once a local sharpening business that was sitting vacant.
“He was an icon in the community. He was a school teacher. He did a drama program here,” said Mills. “He brought a lot to the town.”
The building has become their own personal playground and live-in studio.
“It keeps evolving and we keep changing it and every room has to serve multi-function,” says Mills. “It’s a meeting place.”
While they love the quiet life of their community, they’re also a busy couple.
McCandless is a multi-instrumentalist with a former career in the Armed Forces that took him all over. Now, he’s a shop teacher in Ashern who sells and fixes instruments out of the music shop.
WATCH | McCandless plays an original song:
Derrick McCandless plays one of his original songs on acoustic guitar at the Eriksdale Music & Custom Frame Shop in March 2024.
Mills helped found Stoneware Gallery in 1978 — the longest running pottery collective in Canada. She offers professional framing services and sells pottery creations that she throws in-studio.
They put on open mic nights and host a summer concert series on a stage next door they built together themselves. They’re trying to start up a musicians memorial park in Eriksdale too.
One of their bigger labours of love is in honour of McCandless’s good friends Roger Leonard Young, David Kim Russell and Tony “Leon” — or Lee — Oreniuk. All died within months of each other in 2020-2021.
“That was a heart-wrenching year,” McCandless says.
They channeled their grief into something good for the community and started the RogerKimLee Music Festival.
Friends from Winnipeg and the Interlake helped them put on a weekend of “lovely music, lovely food, lovely companionship” as a sort of heart-felt send off, said Mills.
That weekend it poured rain. Festival-goers ended up in soggy dog piles on the floor of the music shop to dry out while Mills and McCandless cooked them sausages and eggs to warm up.
“It was just a great weekend,” says McCandless. “At the end of that, that Sunday, we just said that’s it, we got to do this.”
Mills says the homey community spirit on display during that inaugural year is what the couple has been trying to “encourage in people getting together” ever since.
The festival has grown to include a makers’ market, car show, kids activities, workshops, camping, beer gardens, good food and live music.
This summer, Manitoba acts The Solutions, Sweet Alibi and The JD Edwards Band are on the lineup Aug. 16-18.
Burdett has been a part of the growth, helping with branding, social media and marketing. McCandless and Mills’s habit of bringing people together has also rubbed off on Burdett.
“There’s more of my people out here than I thought, and I am very grateful for that,” says Burdett.
Their efforts to breathe new artistic life into Eriksdale caught the attention of their local MLA.
“The response from family and friend and community has been outstanding,” Derek Johnston (Interlake-Gimli) said during question period at the Manitoba Legislature in March.
“The RogerKimLee Music Festival believes music to be a powerful force for positive social change.”
Dolly Lindell, who has lived in Eriksdale for about three decades, said the couple is adding something valuable that wasn’t quite there before.
“There’s a lot of people that we didn’t even know had musical talent and aspirations and this has definitely helped bring it out,” Lindell says from the audience as McCandless, Dave Greene and Mark Chuchie wrap their rendition of Take it Easy.
McCandless, 61, said there was a time in his youth where he dreamed of a becoming a folk music star. Now his musical ambitions have changed. He’s focused on using that part of himself to bring people together.
“I think it’s that gift that I was given that that needs to be shared,” he says. “I don’t think I could live without sharing it.”
WATCH | Trio plays song at Eriksdale music shop:
Derrick McCandless, Dave Greene and Mark Chuchie play a cover of The Eagles hit Take it Easy at McCandless and Dawn Mills’s music shop in Eriksdale in March 2024.
- 1 day ago
- News
- Duration 4:42
Joel Jamensky’s sunny disposition explains why the artist with Down syndrome uses the name ‘J-positive’ for his online art business, started with the help of his parents two years ago. “There’s a lot more going on in [Joel’s] art than may be at first glance – just like him,” said his dad, Mark.
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Made Right Here: Woodworking art CTV News Kitchener
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