Exploring St. Albert’s ArtWalk means you get to meet some pretty interesting people. Artists are often people whose creative drive can override all other kinds of personal challenges or build on their predispositions or unique ways of seeing the world.
Take Grant and Ben Kurtz, two adult brothers who both have severe autism. Grant is a fine painter while big brother Ben is an excellent photographer. Together, they exhibit under the banner “Autism Artistry” and frequently find themselves listed as outdoor artists during the ArtWalk events held the first Thursday of each month from May to September.
The last ArtWalk of 2018 takes place on Sept. 6. There, you’ll find them along with some other artists who will surely inspire and amaze you with their talents.
Attitude is ART-itude
It’s something that every driver on dark roads fears and it could happen to anybody. Six years ago, Oksana Izio was driving with her partner to their home in Slave Lake when she met her fear and it changed her life.There was a moose on the highway. Before they could even react, the vehicle struck the animal and it fell on Izio’s side, breaking her neck at the level of the C-3 vertebra.
“That was one of my biggest fears in life: driving at night. For that reason,” she emphasized. “I got bit.”
The accident left her paralyzed from the shoulders down. Her doctor told her that she would never walk, talk, or eat on her own, and worse. What it didn’t destroy was her attitude. She just needed someone to come along and offer her the right outlet for her energy.
“When you’re told that, it really motivated me to be like ‘I’m not taking anything that you said seriously because I’m not a little example in your doctor’s book.’ I’m a lot more than that.”
While she was at the Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital, the recreational therapist tried to come up with ideas for activities for her. Izio, who had painted, was about to meet fate one more time, seeing a stack of canvases and the container of paintbrushes, along with other art supplies in the rec room.
“She was telling me that there was a lady who was at the Glenrose before me who actually is a well-known mouth painter now in the province. ’Maybe mouth painting could be your thing, if you’re already into it.’ I was really hesitant at first to try it but I did. Slowly but surely, every painting after that got better and better and better. Once I got released from the hospital and went home, I was like, ‘OK, I can do this. I might as well really dig my feet into the ground and get into painting again.’”
Being a mouth painter is no easy task, and for many reasons that go beyond the obvious.
“Before my accident, if I were to start a painting, I had to finish it that same day. I’m an impatient person. That’s not my style to nurture a painting for two months. Just the nature of my injury … I have to hold off. If I were to try and hit it for seven hours in a day, my neck would just be wrecked for the rest of the month,” she said.
That strenuous work means that she spends a lot more time researching materials and methods. She used to work in watercolour – a faster medium. Now, she’s more into oils, which are better suited to slow painters and she prefers how they look, too, though she sometimes uses acrylics.
When she actually gets to painting, she only does it for a day before taking the next day off. While it’s hard on her neck, the flexibility there has actually improved.
On average, she says, it takes a month for her to finish a single work. One painting of a river took her a few months but she considers it to be one of her best works. She also painted most of it upside down because she couldn’t reach the canvas right side up.
“I did it on its sides. I did it upside down. I had to really, really think, ‘OK, how do I make a tree branch with this type of brush normally? OK, now I got to flip it upside down and think about how a tree branch would lay upside down using this type of brush.’ It’s challenging but I’m up for a challenge.
“I think the fact that I have to wait, in my opinion, it actually makes my paintings even better because I did take my time on them.”
Overall, her paintings are really good, plus she has an amazing attitude and a great sense of humour. Those are two factors that must have played a critical role in keeping her optimistic and looking ahead to the future.
“Don’t tell me I can’t do something,” she says. “If I couldn’t paint, I don’t even know what I would do with myself. It’s what keeps me sane.”
She only had her first exhibit a few months ago and has been a fixture at this summer’s ArtWalks, often at The Collective on St. Thomas Street. She’ll be back for the last one of the season on Thursday, too, weather permitting. Otherwise, people can see her art through her Facebook page ”Free Bird Paintings.”
Seeing the music
Suzanne Foss, 22, is a graphic design student at Grant MacEwan University and a frequent sight at St. Albert’s ArtWalks. Her works stand out: each piece is a colourful and energetic re-imagining of the entire set of lyrics to a song. They’re certainly eye-catching and an excellent development of the doodles that she found herself doing when bored in class through junior high and high school. She always loved music, so she would simply just write out the words that were sung as she pictured them.In a way, these works also offer a unique insight into her brain.
Foss has synesthesia, a perceptual condition where one sense automatically involves another.
“It’s a crossing of senses. In my case, I hear something, I see something but I also might hear something and taste something because I taste some words like ‘want’. The word ‘each’ tastes like beets to me. The word ‘cotton’ tastes like brown sugar,” she began.
“When I talk to somebody, words … I see them in my head. It’s involuntary so I can’t control it. It just happens all the time. When you have it, you’re so used to it that it doesn’t bother you or anything. You just assume everyone else has it, too, because you don’t know life without it. I see words, and that’s where a lot of the images in the lyrics come from. For the word ‘want’ I see a cereal box. At my house, we used to have them stacked on top of our cupboards. It also tastes like dry Cheerios to me.”
She also sees the music in terms of colour or shapes. It’s always been this way for her but she only realized it five years ago.
It was in her high school art class when she asked a fellow student about an image that she always sees for a word: “what do you see for the word ‘all’?”
“She had no idea what I was talking about. For me, I see an olive. I was confused: ‘You don’t see things? Weird.’ I actually brought it up to my friends later and I got the same response from them where they just didn’t know what I was talking about. I was like ‘What is wrong with me? Why do I do that?’”
A few years later, she was watching a video of a person describing synesthesia and she had her aha moment. It hasn’t changed anything about who she is or what she does, though it does make her work unique to her and to the other artists during ArtWalk.
“Some people don’t care. Some people are just blown away by it. If you’re into music and you like lyrics, some people really like it and they tell me they’ve never seen anything like it before. It’s very flattering.”
She does a bit of design work here and there, logos and such. Her dream job, she said, is to design album covers. Needless to say, she’s really into music and plays the piano from time to time.
“Mostly, I just listen. It’s nice that I can do something else with music besides play. I can show my love for it in a different way.”
She will also return for Thursday’s ArtWalk, and will be at the Strathearn Art Walk on Saturday, Sept. 8, as well. Otherwise, people can search for ‘suzannefossartist’ on Instagram and Facebook. She takes commissions, too.
