Residents visiting Saanich municipal hall may notice a giant smear of chalk at the top of the concrete stairs.
But catch the right angle, and look at it through a phone or camera, and the viewer is witness to the latest public art piece in the district – a 3D chalk work by Scott Gilles.
Locals may recognize Gillies – from 2014 to the demise of the event, he participated in the Greater Victoria Chalk Art Festival. Until COVID-19 hit he also participated in a similar Burnaby event.
He missed working in public until this summer when Saanich introduced its public arts program and he crafted two pieces, a fountain and pedestal in Cadboro-Gyro Park and the surf keyboard outside municipal hall.
Gilles – who owns and operates Azara Effect Productions, an animation, illustration and video production company – spent about 15 hours working on the eight by 12-foot chalk work at municipal hall.
He starts with a sketch on paper, then works the concept, and of course, has a little back and forth with the district on what’s doable, and appropriate for the space. Until a decade ago, work like this was all prepared with pencil and paper, and while there are digital tools to expedite the process these days, there’s still trial and error involved.
“The way perspective works as things get farther away they get squished down and narrower,” he explained. “You have to extremely skew things.”
The musical note, for example, is stretched 10 to 12 times longer than if you were just looking straight down on it.
Everything flares at an angle from one specific viewpoint.
“As you walk around everything just gets immediately skewed,” said the artist whose first work was during the Edmonton Oiler run for the Stanley Cup in 2006.
“I thought I should draw a Stanley cup outside the coliseum and I skewed it so it was a 3D anamorphic drawing but nobody knew what it was.”
There’s definitely some education required. Gillies will often add a sign, suggesting a camera or phone, and even paint a pair of feet for the best viewing experience.
“There’s an awareness of 3D drawings permeating through the culture now, so people know to find where to stand,” he said.
One goal, and a big key to his artwork for those crafting the community arts for Saanich, is his bid to create interactive art. He wants people to be a part of the sculpture. With viewing through a camera there’s an Instagrammable quality to the work.
“I really hope people do stand on the keyboard and get a photo,” he said. “It’s an amazing thing when you can make adults be silly and have fun.”
That’s the goal for Saanich’s arts in the community program, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic hit with its myriad of restrictions for health and safety.
“It’s a really fun way of bringing his art into the community, but also the way he treats his art invites you to be part of it. By you taking part in it, it really comes alive,” said Brenda Weatherston, community arts programmer for Saanich. “They’re fun and they’re playful and there’s always something a little unexpected in them.”
Gillies is among the artists creating smaller scale and closer to home opportunities for people to openly engage with the arts. A recent outdoor opera was also part of the program, with a few others still in the planning stages.
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.
