In Plain View Artists In Plain View

Karen Johannsson is hard at work here in Pat Courtnage's studio at 164 Langside at Sara.
Pat (in the background) generously offered Karen a place in her large studio after Karen lost working space in a fire at her house on Lenore St.
This has been a difficult time for Karen since the loss last year of her own well-known Lipton Street Studio, in which she worked and held classes for years.
We see Pat also at work here with Karen in the background, as she glazes a shoe for upcoming shows. (See Below).

They are both getting ready for the upcoming show at Wayne Arthur Gallery on Provencher which opens this coming Sunday, May 1st. And Pat is doing double duty, preparing for the Shoe Show in Kenora which opens next weekend.(see invitations below.)

All In Plain View artists - your friends and neighbours, invite you to join them this coming Sunday at Wayne Arthur Gallery at 186 Provencher.
If you can't make it to the opening, you have a month to check it out.

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And Pat Courtnage's shoe is headed to Kenora for this upcoming show:

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Medea Artists invite you to:

 

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Kathleen Black shares an image of her piece that was selected for Make Stop Repeat the Juried Manitoba Craft Council Show.

Kathleen describes her work: 

"This piece was envisioned to fullfill the idea of make then stop and do it again! Nature makes snowflakes- each unique! Over and over again as Manitobans know. This glass pate de verre piece was made in stages with a layer over unique snowflakes -fired and the process repeated again and again to achieve the depth shown in the detail."

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Does the term "Starving Artists" present a false image of those who devote their lives to creativity? - NO WAY!!

Here are some interesting statistics recently published in the Globe and Mail:

Earnings by most Canadian artists are hovering at poverty levels and the situation is likely to worsen as the worldwide recession deepens, according to a statistical profile of the country's artists released yesterday.

The findings of the 43-page study, prepared by Hill Strategies Research of Hamilton for Canadian Heritage, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, are derived from the 2006 census. It identified 140,000 Canadians as artists – defined as those who spent most of their working time in nine occupational categories, including actors, dancers, authors/writers, visual artists and producers/directors/choreographers.

The study reports that artists over all are working for near-poverty-level wages, with an average annual earnings in calendar year 2005 of just $22,731, compared with $36,301 for all Canadian workers – a 37-per-cent wage chasm.

In fact, of the 140,000 artists analyzed, 43 per cent earned less than $10,000, whereas in the overall labour force that percentage was 25 per cent. The study notes that the $22,700 average is only 9 per cent higher than the $20,800 that Statistics Canada has identified as the “low-income cutoff” for a single person living in a city with 500,000 people or more.

What makes the situation even more distressing is that artist earnings have been decreasing since 1990 – a decline likely to intensify over the next two years.

According to the Hill study, the poorest-paid Canadian artist category is that of female visual artist, with average earnings in 2005 of $11,421, closely followed by female artisan/craftsperson ($12,307)

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