The winner of the 50th Mann Art Gallery Winter Festival people’s choice award won for a piece the first time she entered the show.
The gallery announced Prince Albert artist Carolyn Van Dyck’s glass mosaic piece ‘Bison’ was the 2026 winner of the Guy Rutter Memorial People’s Choice Award. Van Dyck, who came to Prince Albert from Amsterdam in 1990, was surprised to be selected.
“I had definitely hoped for it. I’d never put in anything in a contest or a gallery or anything like that before, so I was not really aware of it or didn’t know what to expect,” Van Dyck said.
This was the first time she entered any of her work in anything let alone the Prince Albert Winter Festival Art Show and Sale. The Art Show and Sale ran from Feb. 7 until March 21 and was curated by former Prince Albert resident Jason Baerg.
Van Dyck started working in glass mosaics during the COVID-19 pandemic. She was looking for an activity she could do with her daughter, who lived in Saskatoon.
“You were inside a lot and so I needed to do something,” she said. “This is what came out of it.”
“My daughter and I made a mosaic a long time ago, just a house number,” Van Dyck added. “She wanted to make mosaics and then she didn’t, but I started doing it and she started painting instead. I don’t really know how I got into it. Just seeing pictures online and thought it was cool.”
Her home in Prince Albert is filled with samples of her mosaics which mostly focus on nature and animals.
“Once you get into it, I get a little fanatic,” Van Dyck said.
She entered ‘Bison’ because it was her latest piece.
“Of course, you get better. The more you do it, the better you get. My older pieces, I see the mistakes. You see your mistakes and actually I’ve thrown a few in the garbage,” she said.
Van Dyck said she sticks to Canadiana or local animals as her subjects. In the house, there is a wolf, a blue jay, a housecat, and a bear among others.
Caroline Van Dyck’s “Bison’ which won the Guy Rutter Memorial Award at the 50th Annual Prince Albert Winter Festival Art Show and Sale is pictured in her home in Prince Albert on Thursday.
She creates the works from tempered glass. Sometimes they come from unusual places, like the side window of a 2005 Dodge Caravan, which provided her with green tempered glass.
“I spray paint it, wrap it, and then I nip it in a corner,” she explained. “It shatters and I mosaic with those little pieces. Some of it is clear, you can tell this is clear and I painted blue behind it to give a little bit of depth. Because in making mosaics, it’s hard to create depth.” She also utilized stained glass as part of ‘Bison’.
“It brings it more to the foreground,” she said. “The tempered glass is a little bit vaguer, so it acts more like a background.”
According to her own rough estimate, each piece is made up of thousands of pieces of glass.
“I can tell you it takes me probably about 100 hours to make this, because you have to cut all these pieces out so that they fit,” she said. “It’s like a puzzle, but you have to create the pieces.”
Van Dyck toured around various pieces in her home to show the different aspects she can achieve in her mosaics.
She said that typically mosaic artists do not make portraits.
“I figured, why can’t you make mosaic—like a portrait with tempered glass? So I started doing that.”
Van Dyck gets her glass from places like Re-Store and the auto wreckers.
“The material itself is not expensive. I spray paint it, so that’s a little bit of an expense,” she added.
Van Dyck also creates her own frames from pieces of 1 x 4 because the pieces are never exactly straight.
She said that the pieces come from her love of nature.
“I just love animals and nature and Saskatchewan. Although I’m tired of all this snow,” she said.
The Guy Rutter Memorial People’s Choice Award began with Peggy Kerr, who set up a Winter Festival Juried Art Show Award in honour of her son, Guy Rutter.
In its initial years, the award was named the Guy Rutter Memorial Award. The Board later requested it be changed to the People’s Choice (Guy Rutter Memorial Award) and Peggy agreed. Years later she passed away and her husband, Sandy, created the Peggy Kerr Memorial Award. For a number of years he gave the gallery $200 annually for the two awards. When Sandy passed away he left $500 and many of Peggy’s artworks to the Mann Art Gallery. The funds received from Sandy have gone toward continuing the award for Winter Festival exhibitions well into the future.
With the naming of the people‘s choice award, this year’s winter festival show came to a close. The Mann Art Gallery will now prepare to celebrate the 51st Winter Festival Art Show and Sale in 2027.
Van Dyck was thankful to all of the people who chose her work.
“I really appreciate all the people that voted for me,” she said. “I mean, it was a big honour and I didn’t know what to expect.
“It’s hard to judge for yourself how good a picture is or how well it will be perceived, right? And that’s why it’s the people’s choice.”
The High School Juried Art Show began on April 16 in the project space and education studio. The opening reception is on April 22.
