OLDS — Jan Thompson is the featured artist in the Olds Art Club’s spring show and sale.
The show will be held this Saturday, April 15 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday, April 16 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Evergreen Centre.
Thompson, a member of the art club for five years, learned last fall that she’d be the featured artist for this show so she began collating and creating pieces for it back in October.
Thompson works with acrylics, watercolours and alcohol inks. She avoids oils because they take too long to dry.
She won’t do sculpture.
“That would terrify me,” she said with a laugh during an interview with the Albertan.
Thompson figures she’ll have about 35 pieces of her artwork on display, some as small as about 10 inches by 10.
Visitors to the show will see lots of colour.
“Mostly because it is spring, I didn’t want anything too heavy, too dark or whatever – spring colours and spring florals and things like that,” she said
For the interview, Thompson brought in two of her works. Both depict rocks in a river. One, set in the fall, was done in acrylics. The other, set in the spring, is a watercolour.
However, her subjects go way beyond those.
“I did some florals,” she said. “I did some fun pieces too. I have people who ask me, they say, ‘I want to come to the art show but I just don’t have money to spend on art’ so I do some little smaller pieces as well.
“This year, I thought I’d do some fun stuff because I have grandchildren. So I did some little cat pieces. So they’re like about 10 by 10s. I think there’s one that’s 10 by 12. And they’re just cats, and they look animated.”
Thompson said she doesn’t really have a favourite medium to work in.
“I like them all, depending on what I’m doing,” she said.
“Alcohol inks are very unpredictable and you have to kind of work with it. You want to control it but you can’t control it because you’re blowing air on it and moving it around on your canvas and that.
“And so yeah – I think for a calm experience, watercolour. Alcohol inks are if you want a little excitement in your life.”
She said it took her about three months to complete the acrylic, called Fall River Rocks
“In the end I just had the rocks, and I thought, ‘no, I want some branches in there and I want to show some water flow, so I added these little tiny leaves to it. Then I was happy with it.”
Thompson said there’s more to art than simply putting brush to canvas.
“I don’t think people realize that, but when you create something, there’s a little piece of you that kind of goes in it and it’s like, ‘this is what I would like, this is what I feel,’ and you hope that other people feel the same way and like it for those reasons as well; or for other reasons like colour or whatever.”
Thompson says the Olds Art Club’s season is winding down. They’ll hold their annual general meeting in June.
During the summer the club will undertake the occasional plein air (painting outdoors) sessions. Members of the public are invited to join them by contacting the club.
The club will resume in earnest in the fall, usually meeting Tuesday evenings from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the Olds College of Art and Technology.
