Painting on the Mackenzie King Bridge and other art-related stories

Photo by Joanna Rees (copyright)

Since starting this site, I have highlighted several creative blogs that focus on such topics as music, poetry, photography and fiction.  One area that I have not written much about, however, is visual arts that is not related to photography.  I aim to change this with this post.

Let's begin with a wonderful piece in Images of Centretown about Patrick Mills, a painter who is painting outside on the Mackenzie King Bridge for the entire month of March.  (Readers of the Ottawa Citizen blog The Big Beat would have read about Mills earlier this month). The IOC piece contains a great vignette in which blogger Charles Akben-Marchand speaks to Mills while he was painting, and then a few days later comes across some of Mills' work that had just recently been installed on the second floor of City Hall.

If you haven't been following Mills' project, or you have and would like to know more, you can visit his blog where he is keeping track of his month-long adventure of painting outside in the cold.

Another interesting post comes from the Domicile blog, which provides an update and pictures on the work of public artist Adrian Göllner, who is currently working on Swift, an eight metre high public art installation that will be installed at the entrance of Domicile's One3One condo project currently being built at 131 Holland Avenue.  According to the blog post:

Göllner was approached by Domicile and our architect for this project, Christopher Simmonds, to commission a sculpture for the north façade of the building....  The piece itself is made from stainless steel.  The metal is cut, heated and rolled to form the sculpture.  It is then painted with a polyurethane paint, which protects the piece from rust and corrosion from the elements.  In order to make transportation of the easier, Swift is built in three separate pieces, which will be welded together on-site at One3One during installation day.  This all day process is set to take place the 4th week of April.

In other art-related news, The Big Beat blog reports on the restoration work currently taking place on an untitled tapestry by Nunavut artist Jessie Oonark, who died in 1985.  The 3.73 metres high and six metres wide tapestry first went up at the National Arts Centre in 1974, where it stayed for roughly 20 years on and off, before going to Winnipeg for a show on Oonark's work.  It then returned to the NAC where it stayed in the archives.  It is now being restored with the aim of once again hanging it on an NAC wall.

Finally, the fun art-blog BLARG! has posted some new illustrations.  This is an interesting site that I hope to review in the coming weeks.