painting workshop – Art in the Shuswap

Water has been a hot topic here in the Shuswap with our lake rising to near flooding levels and water boil advisories in our local news, but thankfully, the Blind Bay Hall found a fun way to focus on water…by offering a wonderful watercolour painting workshop! If you haven’t been to the Blind Bay Hall, the top floor is surrounded with windows to allow great natural light into the hall; awesome for painting and seeing true colours. The hall’s board invited Juve Furtado, AFCA member of the Canadian Federation of Artists, and award winning watercolorist from Vernon, to come back and offer a workshop showing participants how to develop his soft autumn scenes using his watercolour pouring techniques. Juve is not only an artist, but a retired teacher who is more than willing to share all his secrets, and so the students really get a lot of information about watercolour techniques and all their questions answered. He’s great at critiquing and helping you get to where you want to be with your art piece. The class was full and a besides going home with some new skills, you get to enjoy some fun time working with fellow artists, be it experienced or beginners, sharing their stories and love of art. If you would like more information about Juve and his art, visit his website at juvefurtado.com

Here are some photos of the of Juve demonstrating some of his techniques:

And workshop participants having fun painting:

It always amazes me the quality of artist workshops that our little Shuswap community can bring to us! Carol Warkentin of Sunnybrae manages to bring in a professional and renowned artist, Jonn Einerssen to Sunnybrae Community Hall to put on a workshop for experienced painters that help those painters take it up a notch! Jonn has his paintings in numerous galleries in western Canada and Mexico and teaches a few workshops a year, one of them, luckily for us, is right here in Sunnybrae.

And along with him, is his sidekick, Vance Theoret, an artist of stone works and best known for his famous bear sculptures. To see the amazing completed bear sculptures that come out of a 2 day workshop is astounding! The participants had no prior experience with stone carving and went home with a carving that looked every bit as beautiful as ones Vance creates himself.

We spent the 2 days, watching, listening, painting or sculpting and we enjoyed the comradery shared between these two friends and that of artists working together to create and learn. Here are some pics of the progression of a painting by Jonn Einerssen and beautiful results of the paintings and sculptures created in the 2 day workshop. Thank you Carol for the planning and work you did to allow this to happen and to Jonn and Vance for the wonderful 2 days of learning! If you would like to see more of Jonn or Vance’s work, check out their websites noted below.

Vance Theoret’s website Jonn Einerssen’s website