AN ARTIST`S WAY

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AN ARTIST’S WAY

By Gabriele Campbell, A.S.P., C.I.D.                             www.campbellinteriordecorating.ca

Interior decorating is all about the expression of personal taste, style and lifestyle. Your interior will tell your guests many things about you – where you have travelled, the colours you like, and your design preferences for opulence or simplicity. How you pull your interior together is a demonstration of who you are, and nothing says who you are and what you like better than ART.

I have a client I have been working with for 3 years, and she handed me the task of buying accessories for her house. I asked what kinds of accessories, and she said “something to put on the walls.” The next two hours was spent trying to get a good feel for what she and her family valued in terms of art, what motifs, symbols and shapes they preferred, how intense they liked colour or if they liked colour in art at all, what mediums they preferred – photographs, oil, acrylics, pastels, charcoal, metal, 3-D.

I bought four pieces for her. She liked only one of them.

Buying art for someone else has been the most daunting task I have ever faced. The good news is there is tremendous variety and an abundance of talent to be found making it easy to find a piece that “speaks” to you. If your taste is very particular, commissioning a piece may be your best option.

Val Harle Johnston is an artist living and working in St. Albert. Trained at the University of Regina, she can produce art in any medium but her favourite is charcoal. Going to art school taught her not to treat each piece as precious but to treat the creating process as the most important aspect.

“I want people to look at my work and get whatever they’re going to get out of it. Enjoy it visually… it can just be beautiful and reminiscent of a distant memory. Forget my take on it – just enjoy,” Val says.

Val is versatility embodied. She has done large pieces on canvas and on brick. She does murals for churches, schools, children’s rooms and every other space imaginable. She paints character into furniture and creates 3-D optical illusions out of flat surfaces. She welcomes commission work and through her experiences she has found methods of creating quality artwork relatively quickly, even on a large scale.

Preferring to work on her knees or cross legged on the floor, she journals her ideas to get a mental picture of what she wants to create. There is no pre-sketching involved.

“My greatest challenge was painting a large mural at the elementary school. The faces on the image were very detailed, and the surface I worked on was really bumpy. That was difficult – it took a lot more time than I anticipated,” she says.

As any artist will tell you, evolving their style and their methods are critical to their personal and artistic growth. Her next goal is to have a gallery show focusing on the survival of the human spirit in the context of the holocaust. “Humans are very resilient and I want to feature that indomitable instinct in art.”

Val Harle Johnston “Custom Artwork” can be reached at 780-459-4660.

All contents of this article are copyright by By Gabriele Campbell, A.S.P., C.I.D.      Producing any part of this article without written consent is prohibited.             Copyright 2005

Comments, concerns or feedback can be directed to www.campbellinteriordecorating.ca.