North Portal, down near the border with the U.S., had an artistic calm about it over the course of the past week. The Visions Art Guild’s annual retreat was open to the public on Sunday during an open house event, providing guests a glimpse at what the guild has been up to during their retreat.
The Aug. 14 event, at the North Portal Community Hall featured work in a number of mediums, with the artists themselves on hand, working on their art and available to answer any questions about their work. The artwork on display was done in a number of mediums, including painting, quilting, sculpting, textiles and felting, among many others.
“We don’t really limit it to one medium. We’re open to a number of different practices,” said Lindsay Arnold, a retreat organizer with Visions Art Guild.
Arnold said the retreat is primarily a closed event, where for one week of the year, “artists gather to just be artists,” setting aside the other concerns of their busy lives to work together, in their assorted mediums of expression.
“Although making artwork is often a solitary activity, it’s nice to come together with like-minded people. There’s camaraderie being in a room with other artists, all working together,” said Arnold.
The week’s creative processes were split between collaborative sessions where people worked together and discussed what they were working on, and respectfully quiet individualistic periods, when artists delved into their pursuits with greater degrees of concentration.
Arnold said the Village of North Portal has been supportive of the retreat, and has been providing financial support for the last eight years. The guild applies, every year, for a recreation grant from Saskatchewan Lotteries. Arnold said the funding goes toward bringing in art supplies and resources, which this year, included a visit from the artist-in-residence at the Estevan Art Gallery and Museum, Diana Chisholm.
To give back to the village for all its help, the guild creates artwork that goes up to decorate the North Portal Community Hall. This year, the project the guild created for the community hall was created in conjunction with the creativity of Chisholm, herself.
Chisholm organized a project that called upon the combined talents of several members of the guild, in a photo collage inspired project. Members were assigned a marathon of random photos, asked to take 10 photos of the first things to come to mind, when given 10 key words.
“It was a meeting point for people in multiple practices to participate together. Everyone was very comfortable to use photography as their medium, and the end result was a very collaborative piece,” said Chisholm. “I asked people to find the first thing related to the word, and gave them a chance to get out of the room they were working in and explore North Portal.”
Chisholm said she was pleased to see the combined effort that went into the project, noting that the hour-and-a-half time of the exercise imposed a time limit, that took away some control over composition and allowed chance to take over a bit in the decisions of what photos to take for the collage.
“It’s interesting because some people used the same image, but it ended up in different categories,” said Chisholm. “There were aspects of humour, too. In the ‘undercover’ keyword column, someone put a photo of one of the hidden cameras near the border.”
Chisholm said that the project, a wall of photos arranged into columns and rows, represented the varying interpretations of meaning, and how people view things differently, on an individual basis. She noted that one thing she enjoys about North Portal is the laid-back dynamic in the village, and how living in a smaller community gives rise to ingenuity in terms of what resources people use to create art.
“It’s fantastic to see. There’s a lot of support for artists across Saskatchewan, even in places like North Portal, which aren’t necessarily close to any major art gallery,” said Chisholm. “Everyone comes together, to show their art in progress, and any support toward that is beneficial.”
