Lifelong woodworker Alfons Knott is calling it a career by selling off his tools during a garage sale this weekend. The 79-year-old is fighting Parkinson’s disease and was recently diagnosed with asbestosis as well, and has been unable to practice his beautiful craft in the same manner that he used to.
“I cannot do it any more,” he declared. “In using all these power tools, I shake too much. You’ve got to have a steady hand. I don’t want to end up losing a finger, or more than a finger.”
“It is better for me to give it up. I have no other choice.”
He spent his entire life working in cabinetry, he said, and has dabbled around with marquetry, the art of making images out of a variety of cuts of wood. “I played around a little bit,” he stated, commenting on a career that has given him so much satisfaction over decades.
It is a substantial collection of tools that he accumulated over the years – “a lot of money invested … a lot of good stuff,” he added – and he hopes that many people will still find them useful in their own artistic and entrepreneurial endeavours.
The sale includes his work bench, Lamello joiner, veneer press, and tailor’s table. Everything is in great condition, Knott said.
The sale runs from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. today and tomorrow at 35 Lamartine Cr.
Red Willow Place received its official opening on Wednesday morning with a crowd of a few hundred in attendance. The new home for the newly renamed St. Albert Seniors Association features 17,000 sq. ft. of programming, resource and gathering space for club members aged 50 and up.
It also features the city’s newest pieces of public art, two large ceramic works by the Red Deer artist team of Dawn Detarando and Brian McArthur. Entitled Quilter’s Garden and Sturgeon River Roundel, the first features an image of a bountiful garden that flows rightward, turning into quilts being made by two women. The other shows a menagerie of local flora and fauna found in the area.
“We were just so inspired just by the surrounding area, we thought this fits perfectly in with the love that we have for the environment and what you have here,” Detarando said, mentioning that both she and her partner’s families have strong connections with quilting and gardening.
“We thought, ‘Why not meld those two together and then talk about the sharing of knowledge and stories, passing down the history through the stories and the act of teaching?’ We really feel proud of the pieces we’ve made and proud to share them ... and happy that they’re going to be in a place that will be loved by many for many years to come.”
Alberta Culture Days takes place Sept. 30 to Oct. 2. StArtsFest party starts on Sept. 30 with a big room full of people showing off their artistic prowess.
The St. Albert Paint Party will be hosted by Tyler Dianocky, the Tupelo Honey musician who has lately become one of the city’s foremost paint party leaders with his local business called Art After Dark. He has even become so well-known for it that he has filmed a series of episodes for a television show set to air on Shaw TV sometime in the future.
Sept. 30, however, he’s going to offer up instruction to the biggest crowd of people he’s ever had.
“At the Shine Lifestyle and Yoga Festival, we did something like 130 people, so this is definitely the biggest we’ve ever done,” he said. “I’m really pumped about it.”
The gig will have Dianocky on the microphone again, but offering art instruction instead of sweet Tupelo Honey tunes. A team of artists will be walking around to help him out too. The idea is for the participants to focus on an image of a stained glass tree as the model and try to recreate it in their own artistic ways. “It’s fairly easy so that everybody can do it without a crazy amount of help. It’s open to any skill level.”
The party arrives at 6:30 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 30 at the Tudor Glen South Field House at Servus Place. It’s already sold out and there are a number of people on the waitlist for it too. It’s only for people aged 16 and up. There will be musical entertainment before the event and during the intermission. The event is free but people are encouraged to bring donations for the St. Albert Food Bank.
Visit www.startsfest.ca or call Tamsin Brooks at 780-459-1713 for more information.
Blaine Campbell is asking you to vote and vote and vote again. The local artist, recently moved here from the Vancouver suburbs, is one of more than a hundred artists up for the Bombay Sapphire Artisan Series, an online contest that relies on public popularity polls across North America to pick 16 people to put together an art exhibit in SCOPE Miami Beach, one of the largest global art fairs in the world. That will occur in Florida in December. The grand prize winner among those 16 gets to host a solo exhibition the following year.
Campbell, 43, is a graduate of the photography program at Emily Carr University but has a strong science background including a master’s degree in mathematics studying quantum mechanics. He has spent most of this year as the artist in residence at TRIUMF, Canada's national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics and also home to the world's largest cyclotron.
Perhaps that’s why his entry entitled The Light of Their Eyes (bipolar co-ordinates) features cathedral quality stained glass that has been UV printed with images from outer space, all collaged into a spiral shape “conflating scientific and religious motifs.”
“The imagery is taken from the Hubble Space Telescope image archive and the patterning is based on a mathematical co-ordinate system.”
People can vote until Nov. 7 at www.bombayartisan.com. Campbell is also involved in a Nuit Blanche event called Petite Nuit taking place this weekend. He will offer participants at Beaver Hills House Park in downtown Edmonton an interactive, projection-based work called Skyreach. Large slide projectors will display more Hubble images on the sides of buildings while the public will be encouraged to create hand shadow puppets.
