It was used in ancient Egypt for mummy portraits and later throughout Europe for religious icons, seemingly falling out of favour around the Renaissance when oil and tempera came into prominence. She sports a rocker’s mullet, favours loose-flowing outfits and can’t help but emit the encouraging vibe of a good-humoured hippie, even as she shows us how to scrape, stencil and incise using X-Acto and linoleum knives and a wickedly curved blade about 10 centimetres long that goes by the name “Claw Number One.” After lunch, it’s as close to lecture time as we’ll get, as Petite takes us through a short slide show illustrating the ways different artists have tackled the medium.Įncaustic may be an obscure medium, but it is one of the earliest forms of painting. It’s like we’re cooking some wildly exotic sauce and the sweet smell of beeswax permeates the room.Īs compact as her last name, Petite is a professional artist who’s been working in encaustic for more than 20 years. Walk through the main entrance, however, and you’ll enter a hive of creativity: potters fill racks with recently fired cups and the college gallery hosts rotating exhibits of class creations.Įach morning, six of us students trek up to a second-floor studio and balance on stools at two enormous long tables as our teacher, Sarah Petite, preps us for the day with instructions about techniques and tools as the encaustic paints - beeswax mixed with pigments (coloured powder) separated in old tomato paste tins - heat up on a hot plate. Located right downtown, it’s an unassuming, modern red-brick building. MY TOUR OF FREDERICTON occurs mostly inside the craft college. So, if you’re going to do as the Romans do when you’re in Rome, when you’re in Fredericton, you take an art class. Even the bustling hair salon on the main drag, Sue Lawrence Hair Spa & Gallery, has every surface not covered in trimmings or hair products filled with canvases, most painted by its proprietor. Down the street, music infuses the air outside Tony’s Music Box, which hires musicians to play outside the store during summer days. Monthly culture crawls lead residents and visitors to 20 or so local galleries and studios during the summer, while the Beaverbrook holds court on the main drag, Queen Street, its Salvador Dali painting of the apostle James ( Santiago El Grande) drawing international visitors. ![]() It’s actually hard to escape all that artistic talent in Fredericton. ![]() “EdVentures has become a way of opening the shutters and letting some light into the room to celebrate all the talent we have.” ![]() “We don’t have a CN Tower or a Niagara Falls, so we wanted to create a narrative for the community to express our cultural side and how dynamic it is,” explains Fredericton Tourism manager David Seabrook, creator of the city’s edVentures program. And, in some ways, signing up for an art course might actually be the perfect way of getting to know Fredericton, for this particular city seems to have the largest number of working artisans and craftspeople per capita in Canada. But I’m obsessed with taking continuing ed classes and, in the past 10 years, have taken courses on everything from bass guitar to home repair and horseback riding. When travelling, your art ventures are more likely to take you to galleries for viewing rather than studios for doing. ![]() Taking an art class may not be the most obvious way of getting to know a new place.
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