Friday, June 19, 2009

Art In The Village

Close to the downtown streets of London, Ontario is a small area known as The Wortley Village. It has a small downtown of its own with a few cafes and restaurants as well as a bakery, pet store, market, book and health stores. During the summer months, many community activities fill the streets and nearby parks. Last Saturday, Joanne and I attended the ‘Art In The Village’ festival…


Local artisans filled an open park area, displaying and selling the paintings and prints, as well as hand made jewelry and artistic wood items.


I enjoyed looking at all the stained glass window decorations, as soon as the sun made its first appearance that afternoon.


I was really impressed to see that one group of teenagers had set up a painting area for children. There were lots of paintings that were in the process of drying and you could see that many children had spent a bit of time at this station.

It did not surprise me to see a few familiar faces among the many artists that had displays. Over the course of the last four years I have participated in many community art events allowing me to meet many London artists. We chatted like old friends, glad to see each other again. I told them about my latest art adventures and they told me about some other upcoming art events that they will be attending. I’m sure that I will see them again, soon.

Some artists had decided to set up their displays in front of some of the Wortley Village businesses. This meant that as you walked to and from the park full of artists that you could see other displays as well. The Village had exploded into a million colours for this one special afternoon! It was great!!!


This is where I met Dumay. She had many colourful canvases on display with bright and thoughtful themes. I took a real interest in her work and soon we were chatting away. Dumay has been painting for a little over one year! Yes, I was amazed, as well. This was her first public showing of her work. I felt really special to be a part of this. She told me that her desire to paint came from a spark of imagination that made her feel that it is important to share with others thoughts concerning ‘love, light and happiness’ in a world so full of pain. I told her that was what inspired me… over fourteen years ago!


This is one of her paintings (that I stole from her website to share with you) entitled ‘Healing Hands’. You can see that she puts a lot of detail and uses a very small brush to create the vibrant mixtures that please the eye. To see more of her artwork you can visit – http://www.dumay.ca/.

At the end of this day my eyeballs felt as if they might just explode from art overload –LOL – so I had to give them a little rest to get ready for the next day’s event…

Jim

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