Lakecity muralist Tiffany Jorgensen has had a busy first month of 2020, completing two separate murals and already planning future projects.
Jorgensen is a lakecity artist and mother of three who has made her way onto the Williams Lake art scene over the last couple of years via art shows, beautiful murals and a new project called Art Beat. 2020 has already seen the continuation of this trend with the installation of two new murals at the Cariboo-Chilcotin Gymnastic Association and Dance in Common dance studio.
Finishing up the mural at Dance in Common, Jorgensen was visibly excited by how everything had turned out so far. In 2019 she painted around eight murals, with these two being the latest editions to her roster.
At the gymnastics club, Jorgensen said she installed an eight by 12 painting on the wall of their gym after proposing it to the association’s secretary. When it was passed on to their board of directors, Jorgensen said they immediately, without hesitation, approved the idea.
Jorgensen said she had basically free reign with the mural so long as she included parkour, a competitive gymnast, a tumble tot (toddler gymnast), recreational gymnastics and adult gymnastics. She mixed up genders as a way to showcase diversity but also encourage more male gymnasts to stick with the sport by making the adult gymnast a muscular man while for parkour she painted a woman to have the same effect for girls.
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“I had this really cool scheme, so it’s like blue and orange and the competitive gymnasts just got these new uniforms so I based them off of the new uniforms,” Jorgensen said.
The mural was put up in the third week of January and so far Jorgensen the gymnasts have loved it.
At Dance in Common, meanwhile, where one of her daughters attends dance class, Jorgensen has created a mural along the back, just beside the main dance space. The studio’s owner, Corinne Stromsten, has hated the wall’s colour for some time now and asked Jorgensen to paint something “really pretty on it.”
This time around she was given a completely blank slate, with Stromsten placing such complete faith in her she didn’t even want to know what Jorgensen was painting until it was complete. Jorgensen said that, as a fellow artist, Stromsten knows that giving someone complete freedom is how one ends up getting the “coolest stuff.”
“I knew it was going to be the kind of paper that unfolded really interesting because I painted this hallway with a different perspective than the other hallway that it was painted in,” Jorgensen said.
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Starting off with big blocks of white paint and black stripes, Jorgensen used a drywall trowel and a large brush to lay the foundation for her piece.
From there she began painting ballerina dancers in the windows she formed from the white growing smaller and smaller until they faded into whisps at the end.
“It’s been so fun, both of the murals I just did have been so cool and flattering to just have people trust me and (tell me) to just give her,” Jorgensen said.
One of her favourite parts about creating art is listening and watching the reactions of those who see it for the first time. Having two new murals in places where there’s a lot of foot traffic has already been very rewarding and she looks forward to hearing more of what people think of her work in the days to come.
Stromsten, for her part, was quite pleased to see that her passion for ballet was brought to life on her studio’s walls.
Even though Jorgensen had wanted to tell her what she was making, Stromsten said she was of the opinion that she was the artist and this was her canvas, so who was she to tell her how to express herself?
“It’s very nice to have some art in here and that’s what we’ve always wanted, to support the visual arts in all shapes and forms, I really like it. It now feels more like my space,” Stromsten said. “It’s gorgeous.”
patrick.davies@wltribune.com
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