The Parksville Community and Conference Centre is featuring three years’-worth of art created by students of local artist Patt Scrivener.
The painter, who paints mostly with an intuitive process, facilitates a year-long mentorship program called Make Your Mark, where students are helped to develop their own style with four three-day group meetings over the course of a year, and weekly virtual meetings to help artists with ideas and keep them on-task.
“The goal of the program is to work with artists that want to really further develop themselves and not just take a class here and a class there, and then be left to their own devices, but actually really work on a continuation, getting lots of feedback and learning lots of new tools as well,” said Scrivener.
“By the end of the year, the hope is that they’ve built their confidence, that they learn a lot about the kind of art they want to make and what their process is.”
That’s certainly been the case for Mary Ann Mikituk, who’s got three pieces in the show.
Having taken Scrivener’s course two years ago, she’s back again this year.
An abstract painter, Mikituk said she’s gone from painting on very small pieces of paper to much larger canvasses - currently a 20 by 20-inch canvas.
“And I’m experimenting with colours and techniques,” like mark-making and mixed-media works, she said.
“Patt’s been very good at introducing us to these things — not telling us what to do, but guiding us.”
One of her three pieces included using a pouring medium, with which Mikituk formed flower shapes, adding a sort of collage element to her piece.
Denise Sturmwind started with the workshop this year, travelling up from Victoria to take part.
She does mixed-media and experimental work. One of her three works in the show was made using something called a gelli plate.
A painter paints on the gelli, and presses a paper to it multiple times, allowing them to create many layers with different colours.
After using the gelli plate, Sturmwind took her paper, cut it in four and worked on them individually with pen and ink to create a series.
This and many other pieces by Make Your Mark artists can be seen at the Parksville Community and Conference Centre at 132 Jensen Ave. East until the end of December.
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