A former Kamsack resident, who has painted and donated pictures of the four La Loche persons who were killed last week, is experiencing a huge positive response to his work.
Russell Thomas of Fort McMurray, Alta., son of Charles and Lorraine Thomas of Kamsack, received a response to his paintings from the mother of Dayne Fontaine, 17, and Drayden Fontaine, 13, who had been killed in the January 22 incident.
“The grace in which she offered her appreciation for the paintings was unbelievable,” Thomas said on Friday. “I’m blown away.”
“It’s been a little emotional,” Thomas told the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix newspaper, which included mention of his work in the January 28 issue.
“After he first painted a portrait of Dradyen, he woke up to a touching message from the boy’s mother, he said, adding it wasn’t long before he realized both the boys were about the same age as his own two sons,” Thomas told the newspaper.
“I don’t know the family, but I feel connected in some way to what they are going through,” he said.
Speaking to the Times on Friday, Thomas said he had had a request from a former resident of La Loche to consider painting portraits of the four victims.
“I dived into it on Monday night,” he said on Friday, adding that he completed the first portrait on Monday. He painted his brother Dayne on Tuesday, and then the other two victims, Marie Janvier, 21, and Adam Wood, 35, on Wednesday and Thursday.
The response has been unlike anything I’ve done before,” he said. The last two portraits were to be delivered to the families of the victims on Friday.
A 1985 graduate of the Kamsack Comprehensive Institute, Thomas has been living in Fort McMurray since 1996. He works as the director of communications and community impact for the United Way and says he is also a “recovered politician,” having served on a municipal council for a term.
“I’ve always done art in school and always sporadically since then,” he said, adding that he is completely self taught.
He works with acrylic paints and the pictures of the four La Loche victims are on 12-inch by 12-inch canvases.
Terming himself as “a wild colour portrait artist,” Thomas said that in 2011 his father-in-law was giving his son a lesson in watercolours and he sat in. That began his work in “wild colour.”
“After the work took off in June 2014, I made a commitment to do one painting a week,” he said. “But now I’m doing four to seven a week.”
He said his art was his plan for what he would be doing in his retirement.
Thomas has a collection of 250 pieces that he has uploaded to the Internet at russellthomas.ca. He said he completed the collection in 18 months, and only one piece is still available for sale.
“Usually working from photographs, I’ve done many celebrities including B.B. King and Robin Williams,” he said, explaining that he’s raised $65,000 for charity doing live painting events.
“I paint quickly,” he said.
His father, who showed off the portrait of Mother Teresa which Russell had given his parents, explained how his son had quickly completed a painting of his grandmother one day at the Kamsack Seniors’ Centre while everyone else was playing cards and games of pool.
Russell said that a painting he did of former Kamsack resident, the late “Bruno,” “took off” and spread on social media. He raised money for a homeless shelter in Fort McMurray with that painting.
“Kamsackians can be proud of their son,” former resident Larry Koturbash said about the artist when commenting on the Star-Phoenix article which had included discussion of the candlelight vigil that was held in Saskatoon last week sympathizing with the grieving community of La Loche.
