Byline: Olga Livshin

Dream into reality

Artist Lori-ann Latremouille at the opening of her solo show at the Zack Gallery on Nov. 6. (photo from Lori-ann Latremouille)

Fairy tales do happen in real life. Take, for example, the story of local artist Lori-ann Latremouille. In her case, it was not Prince Charming who changed her life, but rather an art agent, by offering representation to the then 21-year-old unknown artist.

Latremouille left home at 16 to escape an unfortunate family situation. Although she liked painting and drawing at school, she was never exposed to the art world as a child. Later, to make a living, she had to take a job that had nothing to do with the arts. Still, art resided in her heart and wouldn’t be denied. “I knew even then I wanted to be creative, not answer the phones for the rest of my life,” she said in an interview with the Independent. “After a couple years, I quit my job and went to the local library.”

She taught herself art history by reading library books and copying masterpieces from illustrations in those books. She even had a show of her reproductions at that library when she was 18. “I kept asking my friends to pose for me but I couldn’t pay them,” she recalled with a smile. “They soon got tired of it, and so did I.”

Despite the tight budget, she continued teaching herself. “I took a class at Emily Carr once and loved it. At about the same time, I went to an art show opening. I had never been to an art show before. I loved it. I wanted to be involved in an art exhibition.”

After a few setbacks and gallons of perseverance, she managed to open her first solo show when she was 20. “There was another gallery show next door. It opened on the same day as mine, and I got lots of traffic from them,” she recalled. “I even sold a few pieces. Then an agent came to my show. She introduced me to the Heffel Gallery.”

One of the most prominent galleries in Vancouver, Heffel represented Latremouille for several years. Soon after this lucky break, she got an offer from an American dealer: he would buy several of her paintings at once and pay her as much as she needed for her monthly rent and bills so she could paint without financial worries. “He asked me how much I needed a month. I gave him a very modest estimate. I was used to economizing, had lots of practise since I was 16.” She was 21 then and she is still represented by that gallery in Portland. “I was blessed,” she said. “I met the right person at the right time.”

Of course, her talent had something to do with it. Her distinctive style – black and white palette, expressive lines and an occasional splash of solid color – emerged in the very beginning of her artistic career. “One color is like one note in music,” she said. “Black and white make the colors sing.”

Visitors to the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver can enjoy Latremouille’s visual songs this month, as her solo show Dreaming of Chagall is at the Sidney and Gertrude Zack Gallery until Nov. 30.

“When I started painting,” she said, “I didn’t see any of the great artists [and their work]. I simply liked black and white. Later, one of the prominent collectors of Chagall’s art in San Francisco mentioned the similarities of my works and Chagall’s. She even bought one of my pieces for her collection. I feel honored.… When I first saw Chagall’s paintings and drawings, I fell in love. There is magic in his works. He also liked black and white. One of my favorite quotes of his is, ‘If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.’ That’s how I feel, too. My art comes from the heart. There is so much heart in Chagall.”

Latremouille considers herself an apprentice to Chagall, and several of her pictures reflect that self-assessment. Her drawing “Passing the Egg” is a metaphor for such an apprenticeship, a passing of the torch of art. The theme is also apparent in “Master and Apprentice,” while the bride and groom painting “Blue Orchid” clearly drew its inspiration from Chagall’s soaring brides.

Another theme of the show is the unity of human beings with the natural world. In many paintings, the shapes of people and creatures intertwine. There is no border but skin between them. “I always loved nature, loved animals,” she said. “Most forms of animals, birds and fish fit into the shapes of human bodies. We are intrinsically the same. I know that humanity is capable of doing great harm to nature but we are also capable of healing it. People do it all the time, work on restoring the environment, streams and forests. Maybe I’m a bit naïve but I believe it.”

One other pervading theme, running through almost every painting and drawing, is music. Instruments have a place of honor in most images. “I always loved listening to music when I drew. I also wrote poetry. Still do. I wanted to write songs, so I learned to play guitar in my late 20s. I’m an artist first, of course, but I love music and songwriting. I love drawing musical instruments. I think visual art foreshadowed my interest in music.”

Music often feeds her creativity, but anything can give a spark to an idea: a song, a painting by another artist, something she encountered on an outdoor trip. “I sketch all the time,” she said. “Then I look through my sketchbooks, pick a sketch I like, and start a painting. It grows organically, like a visual conversation with the emerging image. I love the creative process, when I see things falling into place, popping up from the two-dimensional lines of the sketch. When people buy a piece, it’s just icing on the cake.”

Even pain and illness have been an inspiration for her art. In 2012, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. After the diagnosis, depression hit her hard, but she fought it. Several of the best pieces in the Zack Gallery show were painted after her recovery from both cancer and depression. “Rescue from Blue” is a visual tale of escaping fear and pain, of flying into the light, while “Dreaming of Chagall” marks a new direction in the artist’s development. The painting is full of joy and more colorful than any other in the exhibition.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at olgagodim@gmail.com.

Dedicated to the community

Dvori Balshine has served the Vancouver Jewish community, in one capacity or another, for 45 years. She is retiring in November from her latest post – director of development at Louis Brier Jewish Aged Foundation – and she talked to the Independent about her life and work.

“We came to Vancouver from Israel in 1969,” she said. As an educator who studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, she found a job right away. She taught Hebrew and Jewish history until she fell into fundraising, almost by accident.

Dvori Balshine is set to retire. (photo from Dvori Balshine)
Dvori Balshine is set to retire. (photo from Louis Brier Jewish Aged Foundation)

“I was hired by the JCC as a cultural director around 1980,” she recalled. “I wanted to start an art gallery and a Jewish authors festival, wanted to do events, but there was never enough money. So, I met with the community members and asked for their support. Our biggest fundraiser was held at the Oakridge movie theatre. They had a movie theatre at the time. It was the opening night of Chorus Line, and it was unbelievably successful.”

With the funds raised by this and similar events on behalf of the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver, Balshine was at the root of the Sidney and Gertrude Zack Gallery and one of the founders, together with Cherie Smith, of the JCCGV Jewish Book Festival. When Hebrew University asked her, as one of its alumni, to head their Western Canada division, she agreed. For 17 years, she served as the executive director in Western Canada.

“I raised lots of money for them, sent many students to study abroad, organized other specific projects. But then I thought: I should work for my own community.” In 2003, she came to the Louis Brier Jewish Aged Foundation.

In the 12 years she has worked at the foundation, she has led many campaigns, and established endowment funds and awards. As well, more than 600 art pieces were acquired as donations from local Jewish artists. These works hang on the walls of Louis Brier Home and Hospital and of the Weinberg Residence, making the rooms and corridors more like those of a home, less institutional. A bus and a piano, a dental clinic and a garden sculpture, multiple renovations around the home and the Gallery of Donors Wall – they all owe their existence to Balshine and her crew, to their continuous efforts to improve the quality of life of the residents. She was also active in community outreach programs, including, but not limited to, numerous musical events and lecture series, book launches and octogenarians’ celebrations.

“My dream was to leave the organization with $10 million, and we are at $8.5 million,” she wrote in her reflections of her most important activities at Louis Brier. “It is not that we didn’t raise it, we raised more, however, the demand from the home and Weinberg annually has been so great that we have only been able to invest and grow to this amount.”

She sounded modest, as if raising almost a million a year is a trifle, but for anyone else, it would be a major accomplishment, even the achievement of a lifetime.

“I believe in the mission of the organization I work for,” she said. “I do it with all my heart, my mind and my might. Of course, there are multiple challenges. One of them is that there are many Jewish organizations in B.C., and everybody needs a piece of the pie. The need is great, but there are not many industries here.”

She also encountered another challenge. “I found that it’s easier to raise money for the young, for schools and universities, than for the elderly. How do I deal with this? With a smile and an explanation. We organize events and introduce potential donors to the organization. We honor our donors.”

Her conviction that everyone should share his/her wealth comes from her family background. Both her father and grandmother were involved in their local communities on various levels, and Balshine has continued the tradition. “Some people in the community are doing extremely well. They have a responsibility to share. I learned that at home.”

Her approach to finding new benefactors is personal. “I meet with everyone I’m going to ask for donations. If I don’t know them, I look for someone who can introduce us. We have coffee together and talk. I try to share with everyone the importance of Louis Brier for our community. People give to people, not organizations. Of course, you need people skills to do this kind of work. You need to be kind, to smile, to have charm. You have to feel it, to be willing to give from yourself; otherwise, you can’t do a good job.”

With such a personal fundraising strategy, she knows many members of the Jewish community in Vancouver. “I’ll tell you an anecdote,” she said with a smile. “I love opera. Recently, I took my granddaughter, who is 12, to the opera Carmen at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. I introduced her to my friends. When we came home, her parents asked her how she liked it. She said that, of course, the music was great and the show. She also said, ‘There were like 3,000 people in the audience, and my grandma knows half of them.’”

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at olgagodim@gmail.com.

Joyce Ozier’s explosive colorful expression

Joyce Ozier’s exhibit, Making Panels panels panels panels, is at Zack Gallery until Nov. 2. (photo by Olga Livshin)

Splashes of colors hit you as you walk into the Sidney and Gertrude Zack Gallery’s latest show, Marked Panels panels panels panels, by Joyce Ozier. The green panels smile. The dark purple growl, “Notice us!” The blue looks like wings in the sky, soaring in joy.

Ozier is fascinated by color. In all of her creative pursuits, color has played a prominent role. With an education in art and theatre, she has always been drawn towards the unusual, the colorful and the non-standard. “I was interested in experimental things, in visual theatre,” she told the Jewish Independent.

She arrived with her husband to Vancouver in 1970, and subsequently co-founded Royal Canadian Aerial Theatre, an experimental theatrical enterprise. “We did outdoor events with audience involvement,” she said. “Our performances didn’t usually have a story, but they often had a message. We employed lots of imagination in our shows. One of our pieces had hundreds of colorful balloons. We created a moving sculpture out of them…. It was about beauty and pollution.”

The theatre was a step towards her current show, but it took many more years before the full connection would materialize. After a decade of producing shows, Aerial Theatre dissolved, and Ozier was ready for a new direction, although she wasn’t sure what that would be. She tried her hands at theatre administration, was one of the founders of what is now known as the Scotiabank Dance Centre, but her creativity demanded a more visual outlet.

“In the late 1990s, I founded WOW! Windows,” she said. “It was a display and design company, and we built it into an award-winning firm. We had many retail clients in the Pacific Northwest, but it started by accident. Of course, starting your own business is risky, but I’ve always had courage.”

Her son was a student at the University of British Columbia then. “He knew I was searching,” Ozier recalled. “One day, he came home and said, ‘The Royal Bank at the corner has terrible window displays. Why don’t you offer them to make their windows for free?’ I did. Later, I made photos of the windows, created a brochure and sent it to the other stores in town. I got my first offer the next day: to design windows for Wear Else. Their designer just left, and they liked my brochure.”

Ozier used her creativity to the max with her new company but she had to learn a lot. “You just take one step after another,” she said. “One of the lessons I learned was that retail display is not fine art. It’s a sales tool. The artist must make use of what the company is selling. But I used lots of colors in my windows.”

In 2009, she retired from WOW! Windows, but she still had a passion for colors and looked for a new way to find her expression. “I started painting. I never painted before, but I had an art education.” Never having been interested in realistic figurative art, she immersed herself in abstract painting.

“I wanted to paint large canvases, to work big, but there was a problem. To move such paintings, you need a truck. Then I thought: if I do it by several panels, I could fit a panel in my car.” That was how her current show at the Zack Gallery came into being.

“I always start with four panels,” she explained of her process. “I paint all the panels at once, trying to get them to balance. After awhile, I move the panels, shuffle them around, change arrangements, turn them sideways or upside down, and a new composition emerges. I paint some more. I never know where I [will] end up with each piece. It’s an adventure.

“Sometimes, I have to take one panel out – three panels work, but four don’t. I always know when the piece is finished. There is energy there I don’t control. It sweeps me along.”

Anything could be inspiration for a piece, a starting point. One piece, “Chefchaouen,” is inspired by a real place, the eponymous village in Morocco. The four panels of the painting form a mosaic of blue and white, of sky and snow.

“There is a story there,” said Ozier. “Everything is blue in that village, the houses, the streets. That village in the mountains was discovered in the 1930s by a group of European Jews escaping Nazism. They thought they found safe haven. They didn’t, but they didn’t know it then. They settled there and painted everything blue. Blue has a special meaning in Judaism, divinity and equilibrium. Later on, they found out that blue stucco also repelled mosquitoes. There are no Jews there now, but the color remains.”

Some of her other paintings have more poetic titles, like a symphony of grey called “Cloud Thoughts” or a smaller one-panel painting, “Summer Wind,” a quaint green explosion. “Coming up with titles is difficult. I have to think about them a lot,” Ozier said.

Her first solo exhibition opened at the Zack Gallery on Oct. 2 and continues until Nov. 2. To learn more, visit joyceozier.ca.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at olgagodim@gmail.com.

Barrable-Segal brings printmaking to life

Jocelyn Barrable-Segal (photo by Olga Livshin)

Jocelyn Barrable-Segal was raised by parents with two vastly different professional backgrounds: her mother was an architect and her father was a pilot. Following her own path, Barrable-Segal managed to combine the two in her own career. For 35 years, she has been a flight attendant with Air Canada. Several days each month, she flies around the world. The days she is not in the air, she is an artist, and you can find her at Malaspina Printmakers, a printmakers’ workshop on Granville Island, where she creates unique lithographs.

“Malaspina is an artist-run centre,” Barrable-Segal told the Jewish Independent on a recent visit. “It started in the early ’70s with three or four artists. Now there are about 60 of us.” She went on to explain that Malaspina is equipped for a dozen different systems used in printmaking, but she uses only one process, the ancient technique of stone lithography. “I love to draw,” she said, “and lithography is the only technique that requires drawing.”

Barrable-Segal does that drawing on stone. The technicalities of embedding an image into stone and later transferring it from stone to paper are not for this short article, but it’s important to point out that each image can have many layers, each layer introducing one additional color plus whatever details the artist wants to add or alter. The process is time consuming and labor intensive, but Barrable-Segal said she doesn’t conceive of working in any other art form.

“With lithographs, you can change the image if you change your mind, have layers of drawing and colors,” she said, “while in painting, as soon as you’re done, that’s it.” She also likes to be able to have several copies of the same print, although she never mass-produces them. “I make limited editions, no more than seven copies of one print.”

Her prints are mostly flowers or landscapes but they are never life-like. They hover between abstract and impressionism. “I’m attracted to metaphors,” she said. She uses multiple sources for her pictures, including photographs from her travels, but she transforms the imagery through the creative filter of her imagination, enriches reality with emotional and esthetic folds. Her artistic touch converts memory into art.

That’s why she keeps flying, to bring back more visual mementos, more nutrients for her lithographs, she explained. “I see different countries, and each happy place finds its way into my images. Of course, no photocopies.”

Frequently, she draws flowers and floral compositions. “I buy live flowers at the public market and look at them,” she said. “That’s how it starts.” Flowers are the predominant theme for her work in the In Wait show that recently opened at Burnaby Art Gallery.

“In Wait is a collaborative project of the Full Circle Art Collective,” she said. “There are seven of us in the collective, seven women: Heather Aston, Hannamari Jalovaara, Julie McIntyre, Milos Jones, Wendy Morosoff Smith, Rina Pita and me. We all met at Malaspina, but then some of us drifted apart. We reunited for this show.”

The inspiration for the show came from the story of Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, she said, and it took the artists three years from the idea to the vernissage.

“Penelope was waiting for her husband to return, but her suitors were insistent that he was dead and she should choose one of them. She said she would weave a shroud before she married again. All day long she wove and then, in the night, her ladies-in-wait would unweave what she had done. The shroud was never completed. She waited. We all wait for something in our lives. It’s a universal theme for women.”

For her, another sad theme overlaid the waiting – the theme of grief. Her parents passed away recently, and working on the show helped her deal with her sadness. “For me, grief associated with poppies. I needed to find solace. I drew lots of poppies for the show.”

Women friends and their collaboration and support were another aspect of the show that came from the story of Penelope and her faithful maids. “Each one of us would make a piece and pass it on to the others. The others would add something, change. They would say: what does it need? Perhaps this detail or line or color should be added.”

Sometimes three or four people would contribute to the image before it returned to the original artist. “When you get your image back with someone else’s input, you think: what do I do now? It’s different. How to keep the integrity of the image? How to bring our combined visions together? This way, you’re always creating.”

Art making is ingrained in Barrable-Segal’s life. “I started flying because I didn’t want to be a full-time artist. It’s not realistic, even though I have a master’s degree in fine arts. But I would never abandon art. I do it for myself. I would continue even if I didn’t sell anything. I always have my sketchbook with me. When I play golf with my husband, I’m not interested in the ball. I look at my shadow on the grass and think how it would look in a lithograph.”

In Wait is at Burnaby Art Gallery until Nov. 9. For more on Barrable-Segal, visit jmbs.ca.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at olgagodim@gmail.com.

Artist via camera lens

Michael Seelig is donating the proceeds of his photography exhibit to the Zack Gallery. (photo by Olga Livshin)

Every one of Michael Seelig’s photographs reflects a place, its character, its soul. He doesn’t enhance the images in any way. Photoshop’s magic is not for him. He even scoffs at cropping. “I might crop a tiny bit for the printing, just the edges,” he said in an interview with the Independent. “That’s my real challenge – to get every frame right.”

His approach to photography is that of an artist. And, he also paints, although unlike his photos, Seelig doesn’t sell his paintings. “They are for family and friends. I never exhibited them,” he said. “My paintings are mostly watercolors. The compositions are similar to my photographs – urban, for the most part – but they are different, too, depending on my mood, often architectural but less precise than photos, less angular. You have to allow the paints to run, to find their own way.”

Seelig’s solo exhibit Traces opened on Sept. 4 at the Zack Gallery. It is a fundraiser for the gallery. “I’m lucky to be able to donate this show to the gallery and the JCC [Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver],” he said. “My wife and I have been supporters of this important institution in Vancouver for many years. We donated time and money, worked as volunteers at various points. I think maybe some people will buy prints of my photographs because the proceeds would benefit the JCC.”

Seelig took most of the photographs during his travels, and he has traveled extensively, especially after he retired. “We live part of every year in Israel,” he explained. “Everything is close there – Europe and Asia.”

Many people travel and take photos, but not everybody can produce a body of photography worthy of an exhibition. Arriving on location is just a matter of buying a plane ticket, but finding uncommon angles and perspectives takes inspiration and a creative eye.

“I took the photo of the historical buildings in Budapest from the opposite roof,” he said about one of the images. “The view from there was outstanding, but I had to find the perfect spot for this shot. I’m interested in details and, for this shot, I wanted to align the lamp post with the border between the two buildings.”

Another of his images, a majestic panorama of Turkish mountains with an air balloon as a focal point, he took from an ascending balloon. “The view was spectacular, the juxtaposition of a thousands-year-old landscape and the bright modern balloon.” He couldn’t have gotten such an impressive shot any other way.

“That’s what I like about photography,” he said. “I’m always looking for things to photograph but, as a rule, panoramas don’t interest me.” Instead, he admitted his fascination with urban details.

As a professional architect, he taught urban planning and design at the University of British Columbia for 30 years and he frequently used his city photos for his lectures. “When I travel, I always have a camera with me, but not in Vancouver, not now. Before I retired, though, I photographed Vancouver for my PowerPoint presentations. I had a lecture on benches in the city, another one on traffic lights. Signs in Vancouver – the images were fantastic. None of those signs exists anymore, which is a pity. I have those photos somewhere.”

None of his Vancouver photos are on display in the gallery. Some pictures, however, represent highly unusual urban elements, like a stairway on a blank wall in India or wall paintings in Italy, which look like abstract canvasses. Others, Seelig took in nature, but the lines and correlations of light and shadow evoke man-made formations. Boulders, for example, pile haphazardly against a blindingly blue sky in Israel, like a modernist sculpture, although no human arranged them. The eerie composition was created by sun, sand and wind.

In one image, trees strain up in parallel lines in the forests of America or Turkey, lovely pastel patterns in yellow and green.

“I love trees,” said Seelig. “In this show, there are four different kinds of trees.” One tree in particular, an ancient terebinth growing in an Israeli desert among the rocks, seems surreal, almost sentient. The colors of the photo are muted silver and gold, bleached by the relentless sun, as the old gnarled tree contemplates the mysteries of the universe. It doesn’t feel like people should exist anywhere near it.

“I have been taking photos for many years,” said Seelig. “Before, they were either for my paintings, although I never copied them, not directly, just to remember something I saw, or I took photos for my teaching. In the last 15 years, I do a lot more photography.”

Seelig’s photos are available in limited editions of five only. Each one will last a long time, as he produces his prints not on photo paper but on archival metallic paper and mounted to aluminum.

Traces runs until Sept. 28.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at olgagodim@gmail.com.

Taking pianos to the streets

Sean Pacey dabbles at the keys in Burnaby, near the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts. (photo from Sean Pacey)

Keeping a business afloat for more than four decades is accomplishment enough, but to keep it in the family is especially noteworthy. “My grandfather and his oldest son started the shop in the 1970s,” said Sean Pacey, the current owner of Pacey’s Pianos on Broadway. “In the 1980s, my father took over. When I was 18, my father gave me the keys and walked away.”

The young Pacey was well qualified for the job. “My mom has a small manufacturing business, and I helped her since I was 11,” he recalled. “I’d come home from school and answer the phones. At 13, I started working at tradeshows, representing her company all over the world. We traveled to Germany, China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and many cities in North America.”

Later, already the owner of the piano shop, Pacey got his diploma in business and marketing from the University of British Columbia.

It’s been a little over a dozen years since he accepted the keys to Pacey’s Pianos. In that time, he has expanded the company, and it offers more services and events than it did in his grandfather’s and father’s days, including charitable enterprises. One of these charities is Support Piano, the Vancouver version of Street Piano.

The Street Piano movement started in 2008 in England and has spread worldwide. More than a thousand pianos have been installed outdoors in 45 cities across the globe. Anyone who wants can play them. Some impromptu players are professional musicians, others are children learning to play or adults who learned in the past but, for various reasons, abandoned their music. The freely available pianos entice many hidden musicians out of the woodwork.

Vancouver picked up the initiative last year, when City Studio installed three instruments in public spaces during the summer. This year, the number has increased manifold: City Studio installed 10 pianos, and Pacey partnered with the studio, donating 12 more pianos for the project. However, he wasn’t satisfied with simply leaving a piano on a street corner. He wanted communities to unite around the instruments, to claim ownership of their urban landscape and its music.

“We engaged in similar projects since 2009 but not on such a scale,” he said. “For this project, we decided to match each piano we installed with a certain group we wanted to showcase. Every opening was a musical event. The involved group painted the piano, and there was a concert by a professional musician.… For me, it is a strictly nonprofit venture; it is about doing something beautiful.”

Pacey’s sponsorship groups came from all over Metro Vancouver and included neighborhood kids from a summer camp, seniors with mental disabilities and terminally ill children. “We picked iconic locations that meant something to us,” he explained. “I had a dream to have my instruments everywhere – in a public park, on a lake shore, on a mountain, under the Skytrain, at a music festival.”

He made his dream come true. The pianos with his shop’s mark are standing on Grouse Mountain and under the Skytrain station in Surrey. They offer their black and white keys to anyone who wants to play in Richmond and East Vancouver, Burnaby and Squamish. One of his pianos allows pianists to entertain visitors beside the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver.

“I drive through the spots of our pianos and, everywhere, people are playing. It’s amazing,” he said.

To inspire more participants, Pacey organized a video competition. “People play our pianos, film themselves and upload their videos on our website. We’re going to select a winner and award him or her $400 plus an opportunity to play with the Lions Gate Sinfonia.”

For Pacey, the project is a collaboration between the city, the people and the music world, and his pianos are conduits of connection. He drew performers for the opening and closing ceremonies for each instrument from the wide pool of professional piano players. Some of them are his personal friends, others he met through his shop or his several musical charities.

Philanthropy plays an important role in Pacey’s life. He wants to give to the community, so he contributes much to various nonprofits – and not just money or his pianos but his time and energy, too. He sits on the boards of several local organizations, including Lions Gate Sinfonia Orchestra.

His “baby” charity is the Piano Teachers Federation, which he founded in 2009. “I wanted to make it easier for piano teachers and students to find each other, to find the right fit,” he explained.

The database of the federation is extensive and covers many areas of the city. He personally interviewed every teacher member before adding him or her to the database. Some of them played during the opening ceremonies of Support Pianos, and other members will play at the closings.

“Our Facebook page for Support Pianos already has over 1,500 likes,” he said. “And it’s only been since the beginning of July.”

The pianos are going to grace their public locations until the end of September. “We’ll have a closing ceremony for each one,” he said, “before we collect them. If any of the instruments are in good condition, we might reuse them next summer.”

To learn more – and to upload a video submission – check out supportpiano.com.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at olgagodim@gmail.com.

Mordechai Edel exhibits tapestries of light on canvas

Mordechai Edel at work in the studio. (photo from the artist)

Mordechai Edel is not a stranger to grief and pain. His parents escaped Austria in 1939. His uncle spent years in the Nazi concentration camps. His father died when he was 16 years old. Edel has been aware of the darkness in the world since he was a child, but he has never succumbed to it. The art he creates is light fantastic, bursting with colors, suffused with gladness. “Bringing joy to the world,” is his artistic motto.

Edel’s solo art show at the Unitarian Church on West 49th Avenue opened on Aug. 1. The artist talked to the Independent about his life and his paintings. His involvement with the arts started in his early childhood.

“My mom baked cakes for a coffee shop in Birmingham. It was also a gallery, and the owner,

Andre Drucker, was my first art teacher. When I was about 8, I won a BBC art competition with my self-portrait. It must’ve been my bright red hair,” he joked.

Even more than painting, he said, he wanted to sing, but for a child of a working immigrant family in post-war Birmingham, it wasn’t an easy or even a realistic dream, especially after his father fell sick and young Edel had to leave school at 14 to help his mother.

“I listened to the radio when they played classical music and opera,” he said. “We also had a very good cantor in our synagogue, and I wanted to sound like him. I sang in the choir.”

He frequently bought classical opera records at the local flea market but couldn’t listen to them at home – the family didn’t own a record player. When someone at the flea market suggested playing them on his player, the music was a revelation to the boy. “I wanted to sing like Caruso,” he remembered. “I wanted to study classical music and opera.”

Instead, he followed a much more practical route and apprenticed to a hairdresser. “My uncle was an opera singer before the war. It saved his life in the Nazi camp – he sang there. After the war, he immigrated to Canada and became a hairdresser. Nobody needed an opera singer.”

Edel followed in his uncle’s footsteps. He moved to Canada in 1969, when he was 20, and worked as a hairdresser, while spending all his money on music and singing lessons. He sang in concerts. At some points in his life, he was a cantor in Victoria and a soloist for the Tel Aviv opera.

But visual art was always an intrinsic part of his life, always casting light onto the shadows. When he opened his own hairdressing salon, he played classical music there and decorated the room with his paintings. His patrons loved the ambience, and the word of mouth spread about the hairdresser artist and his paintings.

It is no wonder that one of the recurring themes in Edel’s paintings is music. The picture “Spinner of Light” looks like a tapestry of colors and notes, where fantastic creatures sway to the unearthly melodies in an imaginary landscape. Flowers dance in several of his paintings, and Chassidic bands indulge in merry klezmer tunes. “O Sole Leone” is more grounded but just as whimsical, a song of Vancouver at night, while “Transparent Emet” reminds the viewer of the spiritual theatre of life. The musicians play in the pit, but the conductor exalts above, a part of a mystical pomegranate.

Symbolism plays a huge part in Edel’s artistic vision. Combined with his colorful esthetics, it leads him the way of impressionists, where emotions get embedded in pictures, entangled with floral and abstract motifs.

“I listen to classical records when I paint. Sometimes I listen to my wife Annie playing her violin. She is my muse. She inspires me.” Married for four decades, he is as much in love with his wife now as ever, he said, and their mutual devotion helped them five years ago, when darkness struck the family.

Someone they had trusted conned them out of their life savings. After working hard for more than 40 years, the family lost everything, about half a million dollars.

“People don’t like to hear others crying,” Edel said, “but frankly, it’s played havoc with our lives. We had intended to make aliyah to Israel for the ‘last and best’ retirement years – even though artists never retire – but we had to recoil into a one-bedroom rented apartment these past few years. And yet, in order to combat our tragedy and adversity, I came up with my ‘artidote.’… So many people need to be uplifted with light and laughter.”

“I don’t dwell on darkness. I try to stay positive, although it’s a challenge to be happy in the face of darkness,” 

Currently, the couple lives on a small government pension, and he paints in the living room – his studio. Like in all other areas of their life, however, his wife is his source of happiness and stability. “My wife says we go forward. And we do. I don’t dwell on darkness. I try to stay positive, although it’s a challenge to be happy in the face of darkness,” he admitted.

The current show emphasizes Edel’s drive towards the light. His paintings vibrate with joyful energy. “I wanted to reach out with my art, to show my paintings to Jews and non-Jews alike,” he said, explaining the placing of his deeply Jewish art in a Christian church.

The show runs until Aug. 31 and viewing is by appointment. On Aug. 27, at 7 p.m., there will be a guided tour by the artist and a complimentary concert. To register, call the Unitarian Church, 604-261-7204, or contact the artist, 604-875-9949.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at olgagodim@gmail.com.

Monsters at the Zack

Claudia Segovia’s creations are colorful, whimsical monsters. (photo from Claudia Segovia)

It took Claudia Segovia a long time to find her niche. “I always liked art,” she said in an interview with the Jewish Independent, “but I’ve been primarily a dancer, drawing on the sideline. When I got pregnant 17 years ago, I couldn’t dance, so I started drawing much more. I also always liked sewing, so I experimented with textile art, tried different techniques: finger puppets, smaller pictures, drawings, collages, sewn little monsters. Nothing seemed to fit, until I began painting. I have only been painting for a few years but I know that’s my direction, that’s what I want to do.”

Segovia’s solo show, Intuitive Mythology, opened at the Zack Gallery on Aug. 17. It is awash with colorful, whimsical monsters. Painted as large pictures or crafted as fabric dolls, the artist’s monsters are full of contradictions. They are childish and philosophical, ugly and charming, spout big ideas or cavort like spoiled brats.

photo - Claudia Segovia
Claudia Segovia (photo from the artist)

“I don’t decide what I paint,” Segovia said. “First, I let my intuition flow and play with colors and figures on canvas for the background. Then, when it’s done, I try to see what shapes are there, what creature emerges from within. Once the creature is realized, I work to fulfil its life. Only then, I try to understand its meaning. For me, it is the most important part. Sometimes I see my siblings there, sometimes a timepiece, sometimes a totem pole. It is as amazing to me as it is to the viewers. Each piece is a surprise. What does this creature mean? What words come up? What questions does it answer?”

For this show, Segovia doubled each of her painted monsters as a hand-made fabric doll. “After I finished the painting, I worked on a 3D textile sculpture. I try to match the fabrics to the texture and colors of the painting. I display my sewn creatures in front of the paintings, as if they are coming out of the canvases, into life.”

Each of her monsters has a story to tell, if only the viewers would listen. All of them are unique, sweet and tart fruits of Segovia’s imagination.

“I have a passion for little monsters, the ones that are funny and different. I don’t like realistic art,” she admitted. “Sometimes, I write words on my monsters. My intuition guides me.… I’m inspired by the Mexican folk art, especially Alebrije – painted wooden sculpture from Oaxaca. I visited the town once, when I was younger, and talked to the artists. I do similar things with my monsters. It’s not on purpose, it just happened.”

Segovia started selling her little sewn beasties long before she started painting them. “My son was about five,” she recalled. “I wasn’t painting yet but I was making the fabric creatures. I emailed all my friends and they emailed their friends and, eventually, a couple of gift shops expressed interest. Now, three stores in B.C. carry my monsters and my smaller pictures and collages. One is on Granville Island, one on Main and one in Victoria.”

She feels excited when someone buys her art – and it’s not about the money. “People buy it because they love my piece so much they want to take it home,” she explained. “It feels wonderful.”

Unfortunately, like many artists, Segovia can’t make a living with her art. “It helps,” she said, laughing, “but to pay the bills, I teach. I teach art and I teach dancing. I love teaching.”

“I don’t teach computers anymore. Now, I only teach what I love: dancing and art. And I concentrate on my painting.”

Before she immigrated to Canada from Mexico, Segovia taught computers. Her educational background includes training in computers, as well as in art and dancing. “I did it in Canada, too, for a few years,” she noted, “before the high-tech crash in 2001. Then, when no job in the computer industry was available, I started teaching dance and art, choreographed a few pieces. I don’t teach computers anymore. Now, I only teach what I love: dancing and art. And I concentrate on my painting.”

As with her own work, in her art lessons, Segovia lets intuition take the reins. “I’m interested in the creative process, not the technique,” she said. “When I come to a school to teach, my lessons depend on the supplies. Scraps of fabrics? We’ll make aprons. Snippets of paper and old magazines? We’ll make collages. I look at what they have and think, What can we make of it?… My favorite art student’s age is from 6 to 9. Such kids engage easily. I think that must be my real age inside, too, about 8 years old.”

Segovia is a respected teacher in Vancouver, teaching art and dancing at Arts Umbrella, the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver and the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts. For more information about her, visit claudiasegoviaart.blogspot.com. Intuitive Mythology runs until Aug 31.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at olgagodim@gmail.com.

Peretz Centre opens gallery

Left to right: Simon Bonettemaker, Hinda Avery, Claire Cohen and Colin Nicol-Smith. (photo by Olga Livshin)

“We decided we’ll be the Peretz Painters,” said Colin Nicol-Smith, one of the collaborators of the inaugural art show that opened on July 16 at the new art gallery in the Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture. The other “Peretz Painters” include Claire Cohen, Hinda Avery and Simon Bonettemaker.

Nicol-Smith knows both Avery and Cohen through the Peretz Centre, and Bonettemaker was his long-term business partner in their engineering consulting firm. In an interview with the Independent, Nicol-Smith said that the idea for the show and the gallery first came up after a conversation with Avery.

“She said that the lounge would be an ideal place for an art gallery. I agreed and put it in front of the board – I’m a member. The board agreed, too. So, I contacted the others, and we decided we would be the first to exhibit here.” The plan is for an annual summer show at the gallery. “All other months of the year the lounge is too busy,” Nicol-Smith explained.

The stories of the four Peretz Painters are as different as their art.

Cohen is a professional artist. She has a bachelor’s degree in fine art and a master’s in art therapy. Her paintings feature the theme of music. The instruments in the paintings blend and dance with other forms, producing multiple and complex associations. Architecture and flowers, people and history mesh with musical nuances – a string, an elegant cello neck, a snippet of notes – as lines and shapes flow into each other. The paintings vibrate with color. They are festive, celebrating the artist’s love of classical music. “Classical music is part of my life. I always listen to it when I paint,” said Cohen.

Art makes her whole and happy, and that’s why she went into art therapy. “I wanted to give more meaning to my art, help others with it,” explained Cohen, who has worked with private clients and addicted teenagers. “I tried to help them focus on expressing themselves through art. Addiction stopped them from feeling, but art is a tricky way to help one to open up. Talking about themselves is hard for them. But, through art, they can.”

According to Cohen, art helps all of us deal with problems, with voids in our lives, and Avery can testify to the therapeutic effect of art in her own life. A former academic who taught at the University of British Columbia, she has been painting full time since she retired. Her artistic journey started after a trip to Europe in search of her family roots.

“Many women in my family, the Rosen family, were murdered by the Nazis because they were Jews. No records exist, but I needed to know them, so I started painting them.” At first, she used old family albums and war photographs to produce her paintings. Her compositions resembled real life and were imbued with sadness, reflecting the Holocaust.

“I depicted the murdered women as grim resistance fighters, but it felt constrained. I wanted to distance myself from the sombre historical reality, wanted the women to win. My latest paintings are like giant graphic novels. The women transitioned into gun-slinging folks. They mock the Nazis. They are not victims anymore, not intimidated. I wanted to confront atrocities with my absurd revenge fantasy.”

The show has two Avery paintings on display. One is a giant panel of “Rosen Women,” dressed in bright yoga tank tops and fitted cropped pants in neon colors, laughing and brandishing their weapons at Hitler. The second is a small, black and white caricature of Hitler. The pathetic little man depicted doesn’t stand a chance against the droll defiance of the Rosen heroines. The artist’s humor keeps her family alive long after they perished in the Holocaust.

Nicol-Smith is another retiree who found an artistic second wind. “I always drew,” he said. “But, as a consulting engineer, my drawings were technical. After I retired 16 years ago, I wanted to paint. I studied painting for two years at Langara.”

He paints from photographs, his own or those taken by others. One of his best paintings, of a Vancouver beach, is based on a photo taken by his grandfather in the 1900s. Unfortunately, it is not in the exhibit. “My wife likes it so much she refused to allow me to sell it,” he said. “My series of paintings on display at the show, ‘Four Significant Figures,’ is comprised of four male images. I’m interested in the topic of a male body.”

Unlike Nicol-Smith, who retired to paint, his former partner, Bonettemaker, hasn’t retired yet. “I’m an architectural technologist, semi-retired,” he said. “I have been painting watercolors for years. As an artist, I’m self-taught, but my paintings are close to architectural designs, very realistic, with distinctive details: landscapes, seascapes, still life.”

Sharp lines and quiet, subdued colors characterize his artwork. His Vancouver streets and shores, totem poles and sailing boats blend reality with fantasy. “I combine photos and imagination in my paintings, sometimes use elements from several different sources in one picture.” All of his paintings are from the 1990s. He hasn’t painted in awhile. “I’m thinking about retiring,” he said. “Then I’ll have more time to paint.”

The Peretz Painters exhibit runs until Aug 13.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at olgagodim@gmail.com.

Gena Perala plays Harmony Arts

Gena Perala plays at Harmony Arts Festival on Aug. 3. (photo from Gena Perala)

“Creating songs, writing music and poetry, is its own reward,” said Gena Perala. The young poet and songwriter is still striving to find her niche in the Vancouver poetic community but she knows exactly who she is. “I’m a creative, an artist. I love words,” she said in an interview with the Independent. “I started performing my poems in the Vancouver Poetry Slam but I love music, too. Sometimes, I just write music or sing but I consider myself a writer first.”

Her artistic life began in touring carnivals. “My parents were carnies. My dad ran a bunch of games on the carnival circuit. He traveled year round, only sometimes coming home. My mom, with the kids, stayed home in White Rock during the school years and then, every summer, we would join the carnival and travel with my father. I loved it. There were people from all walks of life and all nations in the carnival. I was exposed to many cultures.”

She is mostly self-taught. “I took some lessons in piano, guitar and voice but, for my poetry, I read a lot. I read classics. I read lots of Russian literature.… You can’t really ‘teach’ writing poetry. There is no formula. I facilitate poetry workshops in high school; have been doing it for the last few years. I’m trying to show teenagers how to express themselves poetically. Of course, there is some structure, some poetic devices, but there are so many ways to write poetry. I help students to access those ways.”

She also leads poetry seminars for young offenders. “A teacher who knew me from my high school poetry workshops asked me to do the same at a correctional facility for teenagers, ages 13 to 17. It’s the same process, and the kids are like any other kids, they just lacked some love in their lives. During the workshops, I try to let them know that they’re valuable, that their thoughts and ideas are interesting.”

Not surprisingly, her poetry often slants towards social themes. A few years ago, she participated in a B.C. poetry competition about the importance of voting – and won it. “I think it’s important to vote,” she said, “especially for us, women. We have only been allowed to vote for the past hundred years or so. We should exercise that right.”

Going from writing and reciting poetry to writing and performing songs was a small and logical leap. While the activity itself is highly rewarding, however, it’s not a lucrative career. “I make money by waitressing,” Perala said with a laugh. “With my songs and poetry, I’m lucky if I break even.”

Lately, she has been touring, and that has helped financially. “I’ve had several tours recently, after I released my album Exactly Nowhere. I performed in Toronto, New York and on the West Coast. Touring is very reassuring for me. When I tour, I’m usually the feature of a concert. I sell out my discs. I connect with people. My songs resonate with them. They come to me after the shows and we talk. Once, I met a group of surfers, young guys, in California. They loved my songs. But, in Vancouver, it’s hard to get exposure. It’s a tough town to get shows here. It’s probably the hardest challenge.”

Perala keeps trying, and she is constantly learning new skills. One of the most fascinating projects for her was the making of her first music video, Living Proof. She expounded on its creation: “I hired a bunch of professionals to help me, but the vision was mine. I wanted to be floating, but to film that would be terribly expensive. The director, Blake Farber, suggested we use a fan and some scarves and ribbons. It came out very well. And I have tons of other ideas. As soon as I scrounge some money….” She smiled. “Fortunately, my fan base is growing.”

Locals might see her this summer playing piano around Vancouver as part of the Keys to the Streets project. “I first learned about a similar project, Street Piano, when I lived in New York,” she said. “They installed 60 pianos in the streets during the summer, and anyone who wanted to play could. It was one of the best experiences of my life. I was walking down a street and, suddenly, there was a piano and a guy was playing it. I stopped and listened. Later, we talked. He was a professional pianist in the past but hadn’t played for awhile; he didn’t have an instrument at home. I didn’t either, so I played it, too.

“Vancouver started a similar project – put 10 pianos in the streets during July and August. I played one last year. I have a keyboard at home now, but that was a real piano. I’m going to do it this year, too. You always meet people there. Some listen, others play. I love people.”

Perala’s next performance will be at the Harmony Arts Festival on Aug. 3, 3 p.m., at Millennium Park in West Vancouver (harmonyarts.ca/gena-perala). To learn more about Perala and her work, visit genaperala.com.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at olgagodim@gmail.com.