An exhibit at Williams Lake’s Station House Gallery featuring art owned by gallery directors and members is helping connect the community during COVID-19.
“People not only like to see varied art but human curiosity makes other people wonder what people have in their homes,” said executive director and gallery manager Diane Toop. “And, people who purchase art like to show it.”
On Our Walls, which opened Feb. 12, includes artwork from the homes of Buff and Paul Carnes, Sheila and Charlie Wyse, Lynn Capling, Linda and Phil Bachman, Don Gesinger and Cathy Alexander, Pat Teti, Greg and Anne Brown, Doug and Marie Mervyn, Lynn and Kathy Bonner, Ed and Joan Oliver, Mary Ellison, Brandy and Darren Stecyk, Gladys Wheatley, Brian and Lynda Sawyer, Stephen and Anne Oliver and Kathryn Steen.
Ellison, a retired teacher, said the painting by Jack L. McLean she loaned for the show was a wedding gift from her husband, who was working at a local ranch when they met.
“I was intrigued it was done with a palette knife,” Ellison said, adding McLean must have known ranching by the way he painted. The painting normally hangs over the fire place in her home.
Wyse loaned a natural fibre wall hanging by Inuit artist Anana Agnes Nulluq Iqquqaqtuq that her late son, Charles, gave her as a gift when he was working as a nurse in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut in the early 1990s.
In October 2020 one evening she posted a picture of the hanging on a Facebook site — Inuit Art Enthusiasts.
“I explained that my son was deceased and I had no way to find out any more about the artist,” Wyse said.
Within an hour of making the post, several people responded, including the artist’s daughter who shared a photograph of her mom working another piece.
Wyse included Iqquqaqtuq’s photograph beside the wall hanging and said she is pleased to have it with the art which she treasures so much.
Normally the piece hangs in their den, she added.
Wyse said she thought Toop’s idea for the art show was great because of the glimpse it gives into other people’s homes.
Capling loaned three colourful paintings of old churches in rural settings that were created by Rose Depal.
Toop said the gallery had a show featuring Depal’s works about a decade ago.
Toop has a few options for the next exhibit and may feature two Vancouver artists whose works were originally scheduled to be shown last year.
She said the gallery continues to be busy with lots of support from the community.
People enjoy coming in to visit, sitting in a chair that is physically-distanced on the other side of a glass divider at the front counter, Toop added.
The show closes on Saturday, March 20. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
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Art created by Don Gesinger, left, and a piece from his own collection. (Angie Mindus photo – Williams Lake Tribune)
(Angie Mindus photo – Williams Lake Tribune)
Examples of the varied work featured in the exhibit. Top right: includes a painting by Rose Delap (top left) on loan from Lynn Capling. Bottom left: A painting by Sharon Tucker on loan from Gladys Wheatley. Right: LX Forde on loan from Kathy and Lynn Bonner. (Angie Mindus photos – Williams Lake Tribune)
The Station House Gallery’s latest exhibit On Our Walls features art from other people’s homes. (Monica Lamb-Yorski photo – Williams Lake Tribune)
A photograph by Tsvetan Tsenov on loan from Don Gesinger. (Angie Mindus photo – Williams Lake Tribune)
A cedar carving created by the brother of Buff Carnes (top) and a natural fibre wall hanging carved by an Inuit artist belonging to Sheila and Charlie Wyse are part of On Our Walls, now showing at the Station House Gallery.
A painting by Kathryn Steen, Promise: Scout Island denotes a time long before the town of Williams Lake existed. (Monica Lamb-Yorski photo – Williams Lake Tribune)
A painting by Jack McLean that Mary Ellison received as a wedding present from her husband depicts a ranching scene. (Angie Mindus photo – Williams Lake Tribune)
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.
