Longtime Kyla Art Group member Patti Cannon-Levesque was honoured to win the People’s Choice award at the 47th Annual Kyla Art Group Show and Sale at Mont St. Joseph Home on Saturday.
Cannon-Levesque, who has been with Kyla for nearly a decade, won for her glass piece ‘Sequestering: Make Room in Your Heart for Trees’.
“It’s a great honour,” Cannon-Levesque said. “It’s a wonderful honour. I’ve been with Kyla for several years, and this is the first time I’ve won the People’s Choice. It shows just an appreciation of the work that went into the piece.”
Cannon-Levesque had a large group of friends in attendance including one from Arizona.
“I was fortunate that I had a group of friends present when I won the award. It was lovely,” she said.
Cannon-Levesque was one of several artists who had work on display at the annual show and sale. She lives on acreage outside Holbein where she can work with her glass.
“It’s a beautiful spot,” she said. “When I retired from teaching at Sask Polytechnic, my husband, he has a woodworking shop, and he built me a studio attached to his shop. It was the best retirement.
“I’m out there as often as I possibly can. It’s my happy place.”
Cannon-Levesque chose the theme of trees for her piece. She said trees—and the environment—are important to her.
“Trees are a theme that I use a lot in my art,” she explained. “I use reference photos. Whenever I travel, I take pictures. I find trees or whatever else, but most often, it’s trees.”
She said that trees are also important because of Global Climate Change.
“Trees sequester carbon from the air so they are really important,” she explained. “They take in carbon and they give us oxygen.
She said trees are often used indiscriminately.
“They don’t give a lot of thought to cutting down a tree for wood,” she explained. “I mean, we burn wood. We use dead trees in our fireplace. We heat with wood, but I’m very thoughtful. If we’re going to cut down a tree there has to be a good reason or we just don’t do it.”
Cannon-Levesque works pretty much exclusively in glass and her woodworking husband creates all of the frames.
“I’ll just go out and say, ‘so honey, can you do this?’ Or give him a list and say, ‘can you make all of these?’ He never complains and he’s super supportive for that. He helped me a lot,” Cannon-Levesque said.
The tree that was used for the frame on “Sequestering” was from Vancouver Island. Cannon-Levesque was looking for a tree called Big Lonely Doug on the backwoods of Vancouver Island.
“We never found Big Lonely Doug, but we stopped at a place on the way, and I looked around, and there was slate all over the place,” she remembered. “I said, ‘oh,’ so we started sort of loading some pieces of slate into the van. That’s where the back piece came from and then the rest of it is just glass put on.”
She came to use glass as a medium because she moved to the Northern community of Stoney Rapids after she got married and quit school before finishing her Master’s Degree. This led to a life-long love of the medium that continues to this day.
“I thought, ‘if I’m going to go and live in this little community, I have to have something to keep me busy.’ My mom had just started to dabble in glass, and I really liked the medium, so I hauled glass to this fly-in community,” she said.
“I’ve been cutting glass for 45 years. It’s been a long time.”
Cannon-Levesque has been with the Kyla group for nearly a decade.
“I was fortunate I was nominated by Linda and Jack Jensen, who were a long time with Kyla and they saw one of my pieces in the Winter Festival,” she said.
She likes working with the arts community in Prince Albert because it’s such a connected community.
“We have so much talent in Prince Albert,” she said. “It’s amazing when you look around and you see all the artists that are doing art in Prince Albert. It’s a vibrant art community.”
Cannon-Levesque plans to keep working with the Kyla Group and continue to enter in the Prince Albert Winter Festival.
“I’m enjoying being part of Kyla and encourage people to come out and support artists,” she said.
The Kyla Arts Show and Sale featured an afternoon showing for the residents of Mont St. Joseph. She hopes that even with modern challenges people continue to support art.
“It’s a tough time for everybody right now. It’s a tough time for artists because all art is perceived as an extra, right? I mean, I understand when I go to the grocery store and come out gasping it’s hard to say you need to you need to buy art, but I mean, artists are eating too. It’s important, and art is something that fills your soul. I mean, food fills your stomach, but art fills your soul.”
michael.oleksyn@paherald.sk.ca
