Weyburn artist Heather van der Breggen is currently away in Parrsboro, Nova Scotia as an Artist-in-Residence, and she has taken her the good old 'roll-up-your-sleeves-and-help', Saskatchewan charm along with her.

“The residency in Parrsboro is two weeks,” said van der Breggen. “So, I’m right on Main Street, I have a beautiful studio, and I am in a beautiful house that’s right across the street from the Bay of Fundy. It’s gorgeous.”

She said she applied for the residency on a whim and was surprised to be chosen. 

“It was curated, so I sent my work and my C.V. and an artist statement and a cover letter and they go through it. You know, it was an international residency and I was actually shocked that I was in,” she said with all humility. “I didn’t really expect that. I just applied on a lark, and the calibre of artists alone is a learning experience for me. I mean, really established people are here. So I’m kind of at the bottom of the rung. So that’s stimulating for me, because I see what they’re doing, and you learn and get inspired by what people are doing.”

Parrsboro has a population of only 900, but van der Breggen reports that the community aspires to be known for being a creative community that nurtures artists.

“They’re trying to put Canada on the map for plain air here,” she said. “People go down to the states and all over the world to paint amazing outdoor scenery, and they have outdoor amazing scenery here, so they’re really pumping that up.”

She said she is learning the tricks, and that she has already been taken out to a field to do some plain air painting.

“There’s a lot of plain air painters here, and a lot of them, they just get their colour notes down out there in the field and then they work in the studio to complete and I didn’t know that,” she explained.

See below for more from Heather about plain air painting, including an audio interview.

The artist is also giving of her ‘Saskatchewan self’ to share her art education skills with the local elementary school.

“The Inclusion Project that Rickee-Lee and I did in the rural schools in Saskatchewan, I am doing that in Parrsboro here, at the elementary school, because I wanted to give back to this community as well while I was here,” she said. “They were sideways about it, just never heard anything like that before.”

She added the learning is reciprocal.

“You never just learn, there’s always somebody learning from you, too, at the same time, and we take that for granted,” she said.

Click on the video for a full audio interview with Heather.

The plain air technique van der Breggen has been trying in Parrsboro is new to the Saskatchewan artist (photo courtesy ofHeather van der Breggen).

 

 

A sneak peek at Heather van der Breggen's works in progress in Parrsboro (photo courtesy of Heather van der Breggen).