The Station House Gallery is ending its 2016 exhibit season with a wonderful opportunity for the public to become part of the entire exhibit in a show called The Joy Diary.
Artist Cat Fink, who makes her home in Victoria and Williams Lake, has set up a table in the middle of the main gallery and has invited the public to come down and create with her.
The table is filled with paper and colouring pencils ready for people to share their thoughts and artistic pieces on a theme about what gives them joy in life.
The art work visitors create doesn’t have to be grandiose or perfect. She is offering visitors a chance to relax and explore the art world on their own terms.
“It is a way for people to see that creating isn’t something to be afraid of,” Fink says of her idea to open her show to participation. And it is also a way for the community to have a dialogue on what brings them joy, she adds.
There are sheets of white paper where people can start their creative juices flowing by writing words and sayings, and create little drawings about what gives them joy in life. Then there are lots of different coloured pieces of paper on which people can create more in-depth work, from drawings to collage or even origami, Fink says.
People can work at the gallery or take a sheet of paper home to work on their project then bring it back to hang on the wall, beside the larger blank canvasses hanging around the gallery which Fink will be working on.
Throughout November Fink will be upstairs in the artists’ studio making creations of her own to fill those blank pages and be back and forth to the main gallery to chat and work with visitors.
Between Fink’s creations and those submitted by the public the exhibit will be a continuously changing and developing exhibit celebrating the theme of joy, a perfect theme for the holiday season coming up.
Several people who were at the gallery for the grand opening of the show Thursday, Nov. 3 took the opportunity to create while they were there.
English teacher Laura Masini Pieralli had fun creating an art piece in itself finding the words for things that bring her joy and drawing them in circles and wavy lines and filling the spaces between with little drawings. The paper includes quotes such as amor vincit omnia (love conquers all), expressions of love for travel, family, friends, making a difference in children’s lives, and thoughts on a busy day with the line “the chance to exhale after a long swirly kind of day holding on to more thought than I thought I could think.”
And her love for sunrises, because whatever happens, the sun always rises, she says.