Open Studio: The Poses of Gaston Lachaise

Right from its beginnings, Modern Art seems to have had a bad case of anorexia. Perhaps the artists involved felt an emaciated body better conveyed the emotional tenor of contemporary life.

Gaston Lachaise in his studio.

Not so for Parisian-born sculptor Gaston Lachaise (1882-1935). After having successfully finished his art education at the Écoles des Beaux Arts, the young artist was staring absently across the Seine when his attention was seized by a woman strolling, along with so many others, through the gardens lining the Champs-Élysées. He wrote later that he knew at that moment he had found his muse. He followed her, begged her to allow him to draw her portrait. A love affair that would last a lifetime had begun. The figure Lachaise had viewed from afar turned out to be an American woman of French Canadian origins. Her name was Isabel Dutaud Nagle. There were more than a few obstacles to her fulfilling the roll of the artist’s muse. Besides being a total stranger, she was ten years his senior and married. She was on vacation, soon to return home. And home was Boston.

Walking Woman, bronze, 1922.

However, whether through persistence or charm, or both, the young artist’s love was returned, so none of these impediments seemed insurmountable to the smitten Lachaise. To earn passage to Mrs. Nagel’s home city, Lachaise took a job with Rene Lalique designing Art Nouveau jewelry. Once in America, the penniless but skilled artist became an assistant to a sculptor of war monuments. He learned English. He absorbed the idiom of an emerging American Modernism. But mostly he revelled in the fulsome beauty of his beloved ‘Belle’. He wrote, “Through her, the splendour of life was uncovered for me”. Soon an inconvenient husband was dispensed with and conservative Boston was abandoned for woodland frolics in Maine.

Isabel in Maine, 1913; Standing Woman (1932) in the Milwaukee Museum of Art.

Standing Nude with Drapery, n.d.; Back of a Nude Woman, pen on paper, 1929.

Later came marriage, New York and fame. In New York, Lachaise refined the vision of ‘eternity and serenity’ his partnership with Isabel Dutaud Nagel had brought him. By enlivening the cool sleekness of Art Deco with the robustness of a particular living lady, Lachaise’s art caught the attention of American critics and delighted the public.

Elevation, bronze, cast 1927

In 1935 the Museum of Modern Art honoured Lachaise with its first retrospective awarded to a living sculptor. By this time the former Frenchman had come to be seen as one of the chief innovators of American Modernism. And all this without producing a single undernourished waif in bronze or plaster.

Floating Figure, bronze, 1927.

For this Wednesday’s extended session of the Open Studio, our model will be taking poses inspired by the artwork of Gaston Lachaise. The evening will start at 7pm and run until 10pm. We will have a series of gestures in the first hour, two medium length poses in hour two and a single long pose in the final hour. As always, you are welcome to attend for whatever combination of times suits your schedule. The fee for two hours is $10; for three $15. Hope to see you there!

~ Ken Nutt, Open Studio

Visit the Open Studio Website

Gathering Light with Janice Mason Steeves

I started planning my exhibition, Gathering Light, when I realized that it would take place during the darkest months of the year. I began to do some research to see if there were any myths or fables about gathering light in the summer and saving that light to give away in the darkest months.

Last fall I had the opportunity to go on a pilgrimage retreat on the island of Iona in Scotland.  It was on this island that St. Columba landed in 563 bringing Celtic Christianity into Scotland. The island they say is blessed.  On one hillock, legend has it that when Columba prayed each evening, angels were seen to come down to bless him. It’s called the Hill of the Angels. The Book of Kells was begun here but moved to Ireland when the island was invaded by Vikings. This luminous book is now on display at Trinity College in Dublin.

On the hill called Dun I, above the Abbey on Iona.

From Iona I went on to the Isle of Lewis to see the Callanish Standing Stones, a circle of stones,  that are oriented to a lunar cycle called the Lunar Standstill. It is hard to imagine that this stone circle was built 5000 years ago, over several hundred years, and that the builders oriented it to a lunar event that happened only once every 18 years.

The Callanish Standing Stones, Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides, Scotland.

The ancients knew about light. Light was sacred to them. Their stone circles and passage graves were oriented to the light—at solstices and equinoxes and Lunar Standstills. I decided to metaphorically gather some of that light—from Iona and from the Callanish Standing Stones—and bring it home to translate into paintings.

I’ve always had a fascination for light.  It’s what brought me to painting in the first place, when I started to paint in watercolour over thirty years ago. My work gradually moved from watercolour into oils. I continue to work in oil and I mix the oil with cold wax medium which gives some body and transparency.

I begin a painting not knowing where it will go, letting my intuition lead me. I apply oil paint in extremely thin, translucent layers that overlap each other like delicate panes of glass. I approach painting in a way that reflects my practice of meditation, where the mind becomes quiet. The surface is gradually built up layer by layer creating luminous colour fields that appear to vibrate. They are experiential surfaces that shift in different environments as lighting conditions and the viewer’s perspectives change.

Gathering Light 14 (1444) 60×60” Oil on canvas

Aquorthies Stone Circle, Aberdeenshire Scotland

Gathering Light 30 (1460) 60×144” Oil on Canvas

The Abbey on Iona.

I have been, in a sense, gathering light for years from sacred sites I have visited, passage graves I have sat inside and stone circles I have walked. As I prepared for this exhibition at Gallery Stratford, I couldn’t find any myths about gathering light to give away in the dark winter months. So I created this series of paintings as a visual myth.

Lough Crew Passage Grave, Ireland

The paintings are about the light I have collected from places of light.  And they are about giving that light away in the darkest months.

~ Janice Mason Steeves

Website: www.janicemasonsteeves.com
Exhibition at Gallery Stratford: to April 05, 2015

Open Studio: Life Drawing Inspired by the Art of Egon Schiele

For this week’s extended session of the Open Studio we will be having poses inspired by the life drawings of the Austrian artist Egon Schiele.

Schiele – Self Portrait with Striped Shirt (1910)

Born into a working class family in Lower Austria, Schiele was a shy child who drew constantly. Schiele did not do well at school. After losing his father at the age of fifteen, Schiele’s education was guided by an uncle, who, noticing the boy’s talent for art, allowed him a drawing tutor.

After passing through a couple of very strict art schools, Schiele sought out famous artist Gustave Klimt, a leader of the Viennese avant-garde. In Klimt, Schiele found a true mentor. The established Klimt encouraged the young artist, buying his work and arranging for exhibitions.

It would have been an unusual person who would have been able to get along with the odd and tempestuous Schiele, but Klimt was that person. The work of both the younger and older artist grew through their contact with each other.

Scheile’s portrait of his teacher Gustave Klimt, 1913.

Schiele was one of only a handful of artists to have elevated life drawing from a form of study to an art in and of itself. He did this through a precocious ability to juggle elements of rendering, design and expression simultaneously.

Usually when drawing from the living figure, an artist is so focused on ‘getting it right’ that the design of the sheet, the relationship of marks and paper to each other, go unconsidered.

But not with Schiele. For him placement was primary. Moving with ease between observation and abstraction, Schiele was able to take his teacher Klimt’s decorative innovations in composition and invest them with psychological depth.

Allied to his attention to the position of the figure on the paper, was Schiele’s interest in pose. Although Picasso, working in the advanced artistic milieu of Paris, was more radical in his re-ordering of the figure as he drew, Picasso did not come near to Schiele in exploring the expressive power of pose itself.

Schiele’s innovative exploration of the model’s pose highlights the great contribution made by models in the creation of art. The inward-looking Schiele did not arrive at the distinctive poses characteristic of his art on his own. Rather, it was his friendship with the dance team of Erwin Osen and Moa Mandu that awakened Schiele to the expressiveness of movement.

Schiele found the extravagant duo entrancing. Although he was primarily a linear artist, Schiele was inspired by Moa Mandu’s daring sense of style to create some of his most painterly work.

Moa’s dance partner and life-mate Erwin Osen was a mime. When the outrageous, out-going cabaret performer posed for Schiele, it  must have seemed to the artist as if his intense, suppressed emotions  had found their external form. He was to use the vocabulary of movement he picked up from the mine in most of his later works, many of them self-portraits.

Self Portrait Squatting (1916) Self Portrait (1917) The Dancer (1915)

Schiele’s life was as short as it was tumultuous. By 1918, he had been celebrated, reviled, jailed, conscripted, and survived a world war. He was newly married and about to be a father when the deadly Spanish flu swept through Europe. Klimt succumbed first. Then Schiele’s wife, Emily. Schiele died three days later. He was twenty-eight.

But he left a great legacy. In his few short years Schiele brought the decorative style of artwork from the late nineteenth century into the twentieth, laying the groundwork for Expressionism. His  public display of the personal, the painful and sometime juvenile, has become the norm in the twenty-first.

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For this week’s extended drawing session our model will be taking poses inspired by Schiele’s drawings.

This Wednesday’s session will run from 7-10pm with a series of short poses in the first hour, two medium-length poses in the second, and a single, long pose in hour three.

As always, you are welcome to attend for whatever combination of times works for your schedule.

The fee for two hours is $10; for three, $15.

Hope to see you there!

~ Ken Nutt, Open Studio

CLICK HERE TO VISIT THE OPEN STUDIO WEBSITE

A Conversation of a Continuously Arriving Present Moment

Time. It is measured by a clock and calendar. It represents all instants, manifests all moments. It is the thing by which we measure our lives. We both remember past time and hope for future time. Yet we can only be present in present time. The true power of existence is in each moment arriving, each instant renewing, each second of potential activation, intervention, and choice that is embedded in each ‘now’. It is the eternal union between ghosted past and mystic future – the hot and potent seed of human action, volatility, hope, reticence, and delivery.

It is a ‘conversation across a dark ground’.

Ann Beam, Conversation Across a Dark Ground

Ann Beam’s exhibition Continuously Arriving Present Moment alludes to themes of eternalism and inhabits a realm of inherent optimism. Her ruggedly constructed monumentally scaled works with draped, stapled, and falling bark on torn, tattered, painted, decorated, stacked, and smudged cardboard layers are anything but less than extraordinary in their spiritual hopefulness and astonishing in their insubordination to conventional art media. They are seductively constructed paradoxes of nature and man – self and universe – time past and present. Remarkably, the works transfix in the moment of arriving, unchained from their own material incarnations, transcendent of their own proportionality, despondent to their fixed essential properties. As such, you are invited to experience the exhibition in this indeterminate and delirious flux of each arriving new present moment.

In this ‘conversation across a dark ground’, “Imagination is More Important Than Knowledge”, “New Vision Equals New World”, and “Connection is the Reason for Confidence.” This conversation takes place in writing and hand signs around a deep blue arc of the world that scintillates on a dark plane of these poetic words arriving against cardboard interruptions that bear advertising for a battery powered vehicle, recycling, or Made in Canada items. It’s a prolific moment at each encounter in the conversation as a tense and exciting relationship between the elevated universal and the base rudimentary unfolds and harmonizes, contrasts and collaborates.

Ann Beam, Universal/Transversal

 

Mystery Into the Light and Universal Transversal show vigour and movement. Horses running, paint splattering off their painted legs. Hand prints suggesting human traces, a Hershey ChipIt ad appearing to offer some kind of sweet sustenance, and words that read “your gear has arrived.” You feel that indeed perhaps your gear has arrived with all the tantalizing bits you’re offered on inspection. The momentum of the horses running is powerful and you can see that they’re running directly towards our ‘conversation across a dark ground.’ Continually propelling towards it, moving in with their caravans of soul-clad symbolism laid out in patterns in their atmospheric and elusive landscapes.

Anchoring the other side of this conversation is Earth Incorporated. It looms and swirls with sensual typhoons of cast-off matter against a beautiful, painterly world globe. Glad, Harley Davidson, Ritz, McCain, Dare, Canada Dry, Hudson Bay, Tim Horton’s, and Chapmans all appear within the turning, elegant gyrations of paint. They are not necessarily mere malicious remnants of waste however; in fact they are probably more like outposts in the conversation about the present moment. They represent the turning of times, cultural accumulations, visions that created a new world of incorporation – one that will be disenfranchised and created new again. Anchored at the bottom of Earth Incorporated is a wristwatch with its face painted over with white. You can’t tell the time or know when time stopped. In fact time has perhaps been deleted. It’s been removed from our repertoire. We are left at sea in our own existence, running like the horses wildly towards a deeper understanding of the conversation of the present moment.

Conversation in front of Earth Incorporated (Ann Beam)

The image of the horse appears again in Hokusai Watching and most significantly in her iconic work At the Horse Washing Waterfall where long strands of birch bark fall in place of water and curl into swirls and waves at the bottom of which appears an image of the horse being washed by the artist. This is perhaps a symbol of artistic and spiritual renewal as the ever-arriving water falls and flows and they wash themselves in each new moment of its advent.

Gareth Lichty, Patrick Cull, Ann Beam, Aidan Ware in front of At the Horsewashing Waterfall

The waterfall provides a powerful anchor for the exhibition, for thinking about time. The title piece Continuously Arriving Present Moment is a graphic stylization of the waterfall that contains thoughts written out in poetic stanzas.

“Moving

Repleneshing
Blance_ing
What ever

Is
Without Asking

Freely

Given
You
Brought

Your

Self

Here”

Ann Beam, Continuously Arriving Present Moment

 

Next to this is the most recent work completed by Ann Beam titled Time Traveller 2, another monumental work of corrugated boxes. In this piece you experience three different versions of a figure rising out of a mystic white landscape, each at different stages of materialization and arrival. The arrows below each figure point upward and the third, most realized figure, stands over arrows that both point up and point down, alluding to the cycles of time and restitution. The figure is a self-portrait of Ann – a beautiful homage to her own continuous invention of herself as an artist.

It is perhaps then that we realize that we did bring ourselves here. That like Ann, like the horses, like the waterfall, we are constantly in a conversation of a continuously arriving present moment where each encounter is new and new again.

~ Aidan Ware, Director & Curator

Time, Memory, Place, Journey

The image starts as one. A flame dances, a shuffling beat rises. There’s a door and through it emerges a smoky train driving, evaporating into a mythic light. A soundtrack of unknown yet familiar sonancy plays, chugging like the heart of the train towards some equally unknown yet familiar destination. The screens multiply to a three-way and we are on that journey, captivated by a narrative that hints and dives, reveals and dissolves, mirrors, plays at shadows. A man pushes a test button, children smile, birds fly, soldiers march, drips of water fall shattering silence in a time-forgotten train shop, and a monumental black locomotive devours the screen in a dramatic eclipses of pure white daylight. The soundscape becomes a riot and then runs softly delirious as the scenes flip and shift, becoming contained by digitally sculpted wheels and then pushed beyond visual limits. You are on the train moving, you are off the train watching, you are on the tracks walking, you are alone in the warehouse waiting…

This exhibition, Train Dreams, not only evokes a certain vulnerability related to our human existence, it also offers up a challenging visual expression of memory through film.

Sometimes concurrent exhibitions are extremely divergent in their curatorial premise, but our spring exhibitions actually choreograph a larger whole. Carolyn Riddell’s exhibition Raw Footage pushes “past the boat of time” towards a similar distillation of the ephemeral. Riddell’s exhibition is composed of physical things – fabrics and threads and paint and nail polish – and yet they are intangible as metaphors, allusions to time, memory, and place. “Past the boat of time”  we stand beyond all worldly trappings, beyond endemic borders, transported through intense iterations of colour into the depth, within the pulsing oceanic wake, of utterly spiritual transmissions.

Two completely different visual installations, two completely different mediums, yet these exhibitions offer a beautifully serendipitous holistic harmony.

Time, memory, place, journey.

Resonance.

~ Aidan Ware, Director & Curator

Train Dreams and Raw Footage open at Gallery Stratford on Sunday, April 13 from 1pm to 3pm (free to join). The exhibitions run until July 6, 2014.

Living Anatomy – Open Studio with Ken Nutt and Kat Willmore

Peter Paul Rubens, (1577-1640), Study for Abraham and Melchizedek.

Hello Everyone, Ah, anatomy! All those bumps and hollows. What are they? Why do they move around so much?

The old masters knew. Such was their dedication to understanding the way in which the body works, that they dissected corpses to find out. Luckily, they wrote books about their discoveries, so we don’t have to go that far. But a knowledge of anatomy is still indispensable to contemporary artists and illustrators.

For these special holiday sessions of Open Studio, Kat Willmore, Ph.D., Assistant Professor at the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology at the University of Western Ontario, with the help of our model Andre will take us on a tour of the structures of the body. In an informal question and answer format, Kat will tell us about the origins and insertions of muscles and Andre will demonstrate their actions. Your questions are welcome.

These special holiday sessions will run from 8:00 until 10:00 on: FRIDAY DECEMBER 27 and SATURDAY DECEMBER 28. Odd times to run a class, I know, but in a year with Christmas and New Year’s Day both falling on Wednesdays, I did not want to go two weeks without drawing. The fee will be $10 for each of the evenings.

Our Friday evening session will be on the muscles of the body. This will be helpful, not just to those interested in life drawing and figure painting, but to students of illustration and animation as well.

Spiderman, Marvel Enterprises; Raphael Sanzio (1483-1520)

The Saturday evening session will be on the muscles of the head and neck. This evening will be especially helpful for anyone interested in making portraits. This is a chance to learn about anatomy with the help of a highly respected expert in the field and an excellent model.

Opportunities like this do not come along often, even at art college. So why not bring a sketch book and questions and kick off the New Year with some anatomy lessons?
The special anatomy sessions:
Friday, December 27, 8:00 – 10:00
Fee: $10.00
Saturday, December 28, 8:00 – 10:00
Fee: $10.00

p.s. Our model will be in posing trunks, so these evenings are appropriate for all ages.

~ Ken Nutt, Artist

ART MATTERS

Today, I had the privilege of giving a talk at the Rotary Club of Festival City titled ART MATTERS and I wanted to take this opportunity to share some aspects of my presentation and to explain exactly why art matters to us – to our communities and cities, to our countries, and to our collective future.

Recently I read the article For Art Lovers, Detroit is a Tale of Two Cities in The Washington Post by Philip Kennecott which discusses Detroit’s move to have their art collection appraised as just another physical asset of their bankrupt City:

 “Art, is not an essential asset and especially not one that is essential to the delivery of services in the city,” said FGIC managing director Derek Donnelly.

Yet, when we consider art’s role in our societies – as the definition of invention – as the progenitor of all new ideas, forms, and functions – we realize that art has always been essential to our cities. Art is fundamentally creation; innovation, invention. It represents the original, the new. The exploration. The culture.

Creativity has profoundly changed the world. The wheel is one of the single most important inventions of human-kind and it would never have happened without an artistic mind imagining and creating it.

And today, what about your Apple iphone?

It is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.
– Steve Jobs, introducing the iPad 2 in 2011

The leaders of this world know that our future is entirely contingent upon creative thinking: whether that’s in medical discovery or in finding environmental solutions or in designing new technologies.

I believe that creativity will be the currency of the 21st century.
– Gerald Gordon, Ph.D., President/CEO, Fairfax County (Virginia) Economic Development Authority

The future belongs to young people with an education and the imagination to create.
–President Barack Obama

The Arts are not a “non-essential” item; they are a powerful economic driver and we have evidence to prove this:

• Arts and culture industries play a vital role in attracting people, business, and investment, and in distinguishing Canada as a dynamic and exciting place to live and work.
• The Conference Board estimates that the economic footprint of Canada’s culture sector was $84.6 billion in 2007, or 7.4 per cent of Canada’s total real GDP
• Culture sector employment exceeded 1.1 million jobs in 2007
• 10 million Canadians visited an art gallery in 2010, which is 35.7% of the population. This figure grew from 19.6% in 1992 and 26.7% in 2005. (Canada Council for the Arts)
• Canadians spent $27.4 billion in 2008 on cultural products and services according to the study Consumer Spending on Culture in Canada, the Provinces and 12 Metropolitan Areas in 2008 (Hill Strategies Research, 2010). In comparison, this $27.4 billion is greater than the combined spending of consumers on hotels, motels and other travel accommodation
• Canadians currently spend more than double on the arts than they spend on sports events.
• Consumer spending on culture was three times larger than the $9.2 billion spent on culture by all levels of government in 2007/08.

Creativity is the future and that’s why art is more important today than at any other time in human history – as we face enormous scientific and environmental challenges we will need to find alternative, innovative, creative solutions. Our future depends on creativity.

ART MATTERS and it matters a lot.

~ Aidan Ware, Executive Director

From the Studio | Meet the Educator: Diana Erb

Diana Erb is an award winning local artist who has been an instructor of visual art since 2009. She teaches in Kitchener, Waterloo, Stratford and in her own studio, Sights & Sounds, in New Hamburg. Diana holds a BFA in Art Education from Concordia University in Montreal. She also studied art at the Ontario College of Art and Design and at the University of Waterloo. Currently, Diana shows her work publicly and participates in the New Hamburg Live! Festival for the Arts. Diana’s approach to teaching places an emphasis on process over product in order to enhance independent creativity and artistic skill.

A Gallery Strat Chat:

(Education Officer, Peg Dunnem & Art Educator, Diana Erb)

 Peg: Diana, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to sit down with me. I will begin by asking: What is your favourite colour?

Diana: Well, I suppose it depends on my mood and the time of year.

 Peg: What is your favourite colour this very second?

Diana: Purple.

 Peg: What is your favourite art medium and material?

Diana: Painting and Acrylics (paint).

Peg: That’s good news – since you teach painting with acrylics at the Gallery! What is your motto for teaching art?

Diana: Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. – Scott Adams

 Peg: My goodness – such a beautiful sentiment. Thank you, Diana. Who is your favourite artist?

Diana: This is a hard question. My first favourite artist, when I was a child, was Van Gogh. Currently, I like Mark Chagall.

Peg: Lastly, in addition to teaching and making art – what else should we know about you?

 Diana: I am a singer. Actually, I loved singing before I loved art. My mom was a voice teacher. This year, my husband and I started to perform together – our band is call Me & Mine. We sing mostly old folk tunes. Also, I love to garden.

Peg: Wow! An artist, singer, and gardener – you amaze me, Diana Erb!

Thank you, Diana. We adore your calm, creative, and kind demeanor. We look forward to your future teachings, amazing creations, and to someday hearing you  sing.

Please visit our website to view classes led by Diana Erb.

~ Peg Dunnem, Education Officer

From the Studio | Meet the Educator: Melissa Quinn

From classical to contemporary approaches – the range of Gallery Stratford’s Art Educators bring unique strength and style to our programs. These creative leaders continually nurture and inspire the intelligence of imagination. In this Meet the Educator series, we will introduce the exceptional talents at the forefront of art education in our community.

Visual Artist & Art Educator: Melissa Quinn

Melissa Quinn is a mixed media artist living and working in Stratford and region since 2002. She earned her Honours B.A. in Fine Art Cultural Studies from York University (Toronto). Her goal is to encourage students to explore their own creativity through process and exposure to a variety of mediums – to see art as a means of communication, self expression, and fun.

A Gallery Strat Chat:

(Education Officer, Peg and Art Educator, Melissa Quinn)

Peg: Melissa, thank you for sitting down with me to answer some very nail biting questions.

Melissa: Uh-Oh.

Peg: What is your favourite colour?

Melissa: All blues.

Peg: I’m a blue girl too – but steel blue…sometimes found on the bottom of boats…do you know that shade of blue?

Melissa: ???

Peg: What is your favourite art material?

Melissa: Found objects.

A note to the reader: Melissa never throws anything out. It’s not that she’s a pack-rat; she simply sees the value in almost everything.  It’s quite spectacular!

Peg: What is your favourite motto for teaching art?

Melissa: There are no mistakes, only lessons and opportunities for growth.

Peg: That is my type of motto! Who is your favourite artist of all time?

Melissa: Georgia O’Keefe. She was her own person, she lived her own life. And someday, I want to live in a desert with great big dogs.

Peg: Lastly, in addition to teaching and making art – what else should we know about you?

 Melissa: I play guitar.

Peg: And…you are a really good whistler!

Thank you, Melissa for all that you do. We look forward to your future teachings, amazing creations, and hearing you whistle while you work!

Please visit our website to view classes led by Melissa Quinn.

~ Peg Dunnem, Education Officer

Start of the Journey

A month ago, I stepped into the Gallery Stratford office for the first time – joining as Executive Director. I met my staff, learned where everything was, and had an introduction to the systems…

On the first day, it’s hard to know where to begin, where to cast your feet down for the start of the journey.

Yet, I feel fortunate to have been supported by the members of the board and the gallery staff as I made my transition into this role – not just on that first day, but continuously throughout this last month.

As the Stratford community becomes unveiled to me, I have come to see that it is an extremely innovative place and that creativity is something that doesn’t just define the more formal cultural aspects of the city, but that creativity permeates every aspect of how people live their lives here.

Both as the new director of the Gallery and as a new Stratford citizen, this feels like home.

I believe that creativity underpins innovation which is why when we teach children art, we are teaching them about how to think differently; we are teaching them to be leaders, inventors, designers, builders, and entrepreneurs. Art matters. It matters because without it, we wouldn’t have Apple iphones or Facebook or heck even the wheel. Art matters because it encourages us to be human – to dream, to aspire, to create new things.

Art matters very much to me. Today, a month after my very first day, I find myself happy at the helm of a wonderful, community-driven gallery, and happy that the journey is here and it is readied. It is time to set course and cast feet upon the road.

I hope you will join me often along the way.

~ Aidan Ware, Executive Director