“Five, four, three, two, one. There we go ladies and gentlemen!”
The assembled crowd responded to the announcer’s countdown with cheers and applause as local painters Phil Alain, Lewis Lavoie and Denise Lefebvre stepped back to see what they had accomplished in just 45 minutes.
The competitive Art Slam at the Enjoy Centre kicked off the Night of Artists event, which now spans an entire weekend – but when all was said and done no one could really say who had come out on top.
Lavoie’s painting features a dancer in a blue dress on a background with many shades of red and purple. After looking at the moody jazz trio Alain had produced and the simple but elegant treed landscape Lefebvre created, he declared it a tie.
“You can’t judge one from the other, it’s like an apple, an orange and a pineapple,” he said.
Likewise audience members were split on which artist had produced the best painting, not surprising given the subjective nature of such a competition.
“It’s hard; I like the colour scheme of one but I like the simplicity of another one,” Kathleen Troppman said as the paintings were nearing completion. “I’ll have to wait until they’re done; it’s hard to judge a work in progress.”
Shirley Hale said she had watched Lavoie do a live-painting demonstration before this, but had never seen three artists going at it at the same time.
“It’s pretty cool,” she said. “I’m very non-artistic, so I can’t understand how they can start from a blank canvas and end up with something like they do.”
For Joan Werhun, part of the fun of watching the artists do their work was that you could keep guessing what they were going to come up with and end up being surprised. She specifically referred to the jazz trio Alain created.
“At first I thought he was painting a butterfly, because that’s what he outlined,” she said. “I think it’s just marvelous.”
The artists themselves all agreed the experience of painting under a deadline side-by-side-by-side was an interesting one, if not a little daunting.
“Being beside Lewis was a little nerve-wracking,” Lefebvre said. “While I was painting I didn’t dare look at his for the entire time, because I was too afraid of what I’d see and it would throw me off too much.”
Alain also said painting next to Lavoie was a bit challenging, since he’s got way more experience live painting than the other two, and he had the added stress of organizing the entire event as well.
All that faded away when he got to work, though, as it always does.
“You basically just get into your own zone anyways,” he said. “It’s actually very soothing. When you have a really busy day like I had, once I started painting I was able to just relax and enjoy myself.”
Lavoie said he also experienced a bit of doubt while working, looking back and forth at Alain’s and Lefebvre’s paintings – seeing a landscape on one side and the moody feel of the jazz singers on the other side, he was inspired to do better.
“You really feed on that competition a little bit. I think naturally artists encourage everybody, but you want to do your best,” he said. “So when you see people do their best, it’s like ‘Man, I’ve got to do better next time.’”
Lavoie said he didn’t have much of an idea of what he was going to paint prior to getting started, but likened the process to watching a Polaroid picture develop. You begin by seeing the rough outlines of the picture, and as you watch it comes into focus piece by piece.
“You’re just sitting there aiding the focus of your Polaroid,” he said. “That’s what it feels like.”
The other two said they had done a bit of preplanning before getting started.
Lefebvre said at the last minute she chose an image she had been obsessed with a few years ago, having painted it in warm tones, cool tones, and different coloured skies.
“I was obsessed with that image for some reason: the path, the trees, the big tree in the foreground,” she said. “I loved the shapes and stuff when I was painting it before.”
Alain didn’t have an image in mind, he said, but he knew he would do something with musicians for the 45-minute painting sessions, since he already had a lot of experience with that subject matter.
“It’s best to go with something you have a familiarity with than try to do something out of your comfort zone,” he said.
And while audience members may not have noticed, all three artists said they had made some small mistakes they might have liked to improve if they had had more time.
“That’s why I have to turn them away from me; I could work on a painting until the end of time and it would never be finished,” Lefebvre said.
For Alain, working with such a tight time constraint means sometimes doing your best to ignore the mistakes or work around them, but he conceded an artist can be his own worst critic and audiences might not even notice the error.
“It comes down to just being able to fake it. It’s like a musician when they hit a wrong note; nine times out of 10 they’re the only ones that know they hit it,” he said.
As stressful as the process might have been, though, they all said they’d be willing to take another kick at the cat if the opportunity presented itself, and all spoke highly of the entire event.
“The Night of Artists makes my heart sing,” Lefebvre said.
