The Very Best Folks I Know

The Very Best Folks I Know with Steven Rhude, Ian Gilson, Geoff Butler to name a few...and ME is on till Sept. 4th...check it out.

http://www.harvestgallery.ca/index.php

House of Film

Ok..sooooo...Steven Rhude made a cool painting of a house..in need of repair..to say the least.. and he titled it "House of Film...and frig, I can't remember the rest of the title...anyways..Steven was referring to Stephen McNeil's film credit cut error and then he asked how I thought Judy would react and if you don't know who Judy is..well..me neither.. and then I said she would grab a broom and get to work and Steven said hook it..and I said ok..even though I was scared but I did it and here it is. :)..holy run on sentence.

Terroir

Steven Rhude wrote a lovely piece on Terroir.

http://srhude.blogspot.ca/2016/08/terroir-turning-water-into-wine.html

NS Folk Art Festival 2016

  Joe Winters was the poster artist this year and it is quite an honour to be chosen. His art is on the poster ..of course, and he has the privilege of having the best table in the arena to display his work and the Lunenburg Hertiage Society purchases the piece that is displayed in the poster...it's all good, but...it's not,  Joe passed away in February of 2016. I didn't know Joe that well but I could tell he was the real deal.. a true folk artist. I could tell by the way he talked to the collectors at the festival and I could tell by his work, like Chris Huntington says, "It (folk art) has a life of its own or it doesn't"....and Joe's work had life.

I spoke to Marilyn, Joe's wife, about him and she said he loved making folk art. He was into "dumpster diving" as he liked the idea of using recycled materials for his work. She said one of his favourite pieces he made was the Louis St. Laurent, an ice breaker that Joe was commissioned to create. He also made a mural of Lunenburg and was known for the "Little People" carvings at the White Point Lodge.

 David Stephens, a fellow artist and friend said:

 I think Joe's art creations were drawn from a range of influences, with an emphasis on his time spent as a sailor in the Royal Canadian Navy, then as a civilian, "Dockyard Matey" at the Navy Dockyard, and later as a house painter. He was able to draw on a vast range of experiences, skills, talents and abilities, which shone through in his work, from the primary execution of the piece, right down to the details and the finished painting. He truly was a "wizard in wood".... Joe had that special something which made him and his work unique, and that is the indescribable ability to take in the world around him, and to express what he saw and experienced in a way that enabled him to share his thoughts and his humour with an appreciative audience....He was forever humble and down-to-earth, the genuine article, who never tolerated bullshit. Joe always managed to see the bright side of life and events. So very much of that was also down to his best friend, his life companion, his dear, loving wife, Marilyn. I always looked forward to catching up with both of them at festival time, to see what was new, particularly what colour Marilyn had dyed her hair - or what they may have added to their art van, and to their hot pink Hummer. They were a team - but most importantly, they were a loving couple, so very much in peace and harmony - always with a smile, a joke, and a laugh to share, to help brighten up the world around them. He will be missed.

I asked Marilyn if there was a gallery carrying Joe's work and she said,  "No, what I have on the table is what is left." On the table was an unfinished piece. Joe had plans to make a painting as a  tribute to David Stephens but wasn't able to complete it. I asked David if he would finish it ..he replied, "No..too hard."

Marilyn gave me a copy of Joe's obituary and what gave me a lump in my throat was at the end it said, "In memory of Joe's creativity, it is requested those attending on Saturday, please wear bright colours."

Extra Festive

Whoa nellie..the Nova Scotia Folk Art Festival seemed extra festive this year. A big thanks to the volunteers, buyers and artists..you people are the cat's meow.

Make America a Pussy Again

"Make America a Pussy Again"
... will be in the auction at the NS Folk Art Festival..this Sunday....Lunenburg Memorial Arena...12-4pm..see you there!

Rooster on a Boat

This guy shall be at the NS FOLK ART FESTIVAL.
This Sunday.
Lunenburg.
12-4
Memorial Arena

NS Folk Art Festival 2016

Here is something to read to get you in the folk art mood.

See you at the festival!

:)

http://southshorebreaker.ca/2016/07/19/folk-art-fest/

Weird minds think alike.

I was chatting with Steven Rhude the other day and he said he was working on a painting of lady with a buoy on her head..and I said, "SHUT UP!, I just hooked a judy with a buoy on her head titled "Fishing School""...this is what we do in Nova Scotia.

http://srhude.blogspot.ca/2016/07/fishing-school-rug-hooking-laura-kenney.html

Nova Scotia Folk Art Festival

Judy has been sipping cocktails in the backyard and I have been busy hooking getting ready for the NS FOLK ART FESTIVAL...hope to see you there.

Surfing the Ironing Board.... is coming down

Going to Halifax tomorrow to take down "Surfing the Ironing Board" ..Judy is going to miss that place... :) A big thank you to the lovely people at the Mary Black Gallery, and thank you to everyone who came out to see the exhibit..appreciate it.

Surfing the Ironing Board in Local Xpress

Elissa Barnard wrote a great article in the Local Xpress.

The show is on for another week..check it out if you have the chance, thanks.

Laura Kenney hooks a Maritime woman's world

Truro artist Laura Kenney finds her own voice in the enchanting iconic and fictional Maritime woman Judy in her comical, issue-oriented, multi-coloured hooked rugs in Surfing The Ironing Board at the Mary E Black Gallery, Halifax, to July 10.

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Jul 2, 2016 10:39 AM by: Elissa Barnard

I'd Rather Be Reading, by Truro rug hooking artist Laura Kenney, is in her exhibit Surfing The Ironing Board at the Mary E Black Gallery, Halifax, to July 10.

Laura Kenney draws a viewer in with humour and colour, then makes social commentary in her rug hooking exhibit, Surfing The Ironing Board, at the Mary E Black Gallery to July 10.
Kenney is concerned about out-migration, the collapse of the fishing industry, the loss of lighthouses and the domestic life of women.
She does not like housework and she names her first major solo show for her mother, who is a “fanatical house cleaner” and has always hated ironing shirts, says the Truro artist.
“My dad was in the military and she had a million shirts to iron and she'd be so cranky. When the ironing board came out, everybody ran.”
Kenney releases her mother by letting her fictional character of Judy surf on the ironing board in just one of many playful images in a story told through the voice of Judy.
This fictional character is becoming so popular that friends of Kenney's dressed up as her for the opening. “Who doesn't relate to Judy?” said Susan Charles, director of the Nova Scotia Centre for Craft and Design, which runs the Halifax gallery.
The iconic Maritime woman is a lean Modigliani-like figure in red boots with a black dress, a red bun and a blank face that expresses volumes.
Judy represents a hard-working Maritime woman and a mother who is bound to housework but who dreams of other things, a woman whose values are traditional — family, hard work, roots — but whose love of life is expressed in whimsy, humour and colour.
“I didn't intend to make her. She just came to me,” says Kenney. “She speaks to people, it's mostly women but men too. People are drawn to her.”
Kenney, who has a degree in chemistry, started hooking in 1998 through the Rug Hooking Guild of Nova Scotia in Truro. Three years ago she was looking for new subject matter for the Nova Scotia Folk Art Festival when she stumbled upon this character.
“I did three rugs, one after another, with the black dress, red boots and red hair and I went, 'What's this?'
“It's like she's riding the boat now.”
The exhibit reads like a story starting at the opposite wall with a swirling, gorgeous, red abstracted rug that leads into Judy's life as a woman.
She gets married in her black dress holding a bouquet of fish and with a belly bump, which a gallery visitor had to point out to me as she laughed.
Two side-by-side rugs express the duality of motherhood. “Motherhood is a wonderful bonding thing but it is also a very restricting thing,” said Kenney.
As a stay-at-home-mom, Judy is literally under the house like the Wicked Witch of the East under Dorothy's house in The Wizard of Oz. The artwork, Judy ... she is a mother, is a simplified, evocative image of a female figure bent over a girl with streaming felted red hair in a river of unspun wool. The background is done in ribs of white showing off the sculptural, iconic figures.
Kenney, whose kids are now 15 and 12, says she has never found that elusive balance of vocation, housework and motherhood. “I wouldn't say balance, I'm just kind of doing it. I'm doing my best but often you feel like you are not doing anything well.”
The gallery's back wall is the “domestic chore wall” where Judy tries to avoid ironing, drinks while she washes the floor and escapes to a bath in a clawfoot tub. The rugs' backgrounds are rigid vertical lines in greens and golds that carry a sense of entrapment.
“It's meant to be like wallpaper. When she goes out, there is the whirling sky.”
Kenney, in the third section, puts Judy outdoors with the gorgeous van Gogh-esque skies in saturated colours.
She expresses her concern for a vanishing way of life in the Maritimes as Judy hangs buoys from trees and her arms, moves her house on a trolley and has dinner with a lighthouse.
“My roots are here and I've lived here for almost 20 years and I feel this place, it seems like we're on the brink of extinction but we're surviving,” said Kenney.
Inspired by rug-hooking artists Nancy Edell and Deanne Fitzpatrick, she finds her artistic voice in a medium that is both traditionally female and a domestic art which suits her message.
Catalogue essayist and fellow artist Steven Rhude suggests she also speaks through the voices that exist in the used cloth she finds at Frenchys and Louis's and in sari ribbons.
“Clothing speaks to the person who wore it – I see a small red blazer and I think Nancy Regan,” said Kenney. “You think what happened to the person who wore that and then the sari cloth tells its own story. Inanimate objects have a certain voice, I think it adds something to the final piece.”
Kenney feels the introduction of commercial patterns killed the individual voices of women rug hookers.
“Before patterns came out, women were just putting whatever was on their minds on the burlap. What would happen to the world of painting if everybody did paint-by-numbers?”
This exhibit includes a station for trying rug hooking. Let's just say it will not be a second career for me. However, the attempt leaves one amazed at Kenney's patience and skill and at a wonderful, joyful show rooted in deep thought and feeling.
Surfing The Ironing Board is at the Mary E Black Gallery, Nova Scotia Centre for Craft and Design, nestled between Pier 21 and the Seaport Market, to July 10 and open Tuesday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. The centre's art and craft shop reopens in July across the street in the former Seeds Gallery space. This exhibit also goes to the Craft Council Annex Gallery in St. John's, N.L, in August 2017.
Kenney is back with over 50 folk artists at the Nova Scotia Folk Art Festival on Sunday, July 31, noon to 4 p.m., at the Lunenburg Memorial Arena and is in the group show, The Very Best Folks I Know: Storytellers and Satirists Group Show, opening July 30 at Harvest Gallery, Wolfville, and also featuring the work of Geoff Butler, Ian Gilson, John Neville, Steven Rhude, Barry Colpitts, Ed Bernard, Richard Crowe and the Naugler brothers, Bradford and Ransford.
Kenney had two rugs selected for Terroir: A Nova Scotia Survey, the new exhibit of works by 29 Nova Scotia artists at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia to Jan. 15.

Sunny Ways

It is a Sunny Way kinda day..HAPPY BIRTHDAY CANADA.