A seven-sculpture commission

In the last month and a half I have been working on a major sculpture commission. I just delivered the final sculptures to the client on Monday. Now I need to rest my hands as my carpal tunnel is numbing them quite frequently now!

The commission was a sub-contract for a larger project being prepared by House of Kevin for an Environment Canada interpretation centre in Halifax. House of Kevin found me on the internet. It pays to keep a website!

I made three fish, two salmon and one trout:

A seagull:

A bear:

And two different kinds of grasses. Estuary cordgrass (the wavy stuff) and your garden variety grass, if your garden variety grass was five and a half feet long and four feet high.

The fish, bear and the garden variety grasses are all relief sculptures, relatively thin and intended to be mounted to a wall. The seagull and the estuary cordgrass are the three-dimensional sculptures I am more accustomed to making. 

I must admit, the garden variety grass sculpture has me dreaming of a wheat field installation of copper grasses in a big room, with paths running between the sculptures so you can stand in a field of copper wheat. First, rest my hands. Then on to the big dreams!

It's Summertime, and the living is - Busy!

Lisa at Recycl'Art 2010 with "Entwined" wire sculpture

Summer, in an artistic life, is often one of the busier times of the year, with shows, exhibitions and other events to keep you hopping. And I've been hopping around a lot!

My Solo show at Espace Pierre-Debain in Aylmer

The first solo show I've had in my career was in the spring, not the summer, but I judge it to be worth a mention, as it was beautifully designed and lighted. Espace Pierre-Debain is a municipal gallery in the Aylmer sector of Gatineau specializing in artisan work. I strongly suggest preparing a proposal when a call goes out, as the remuneration package is excellent!

I exhibited stained glass, jewellery and sculpture. The admistration mentioned that my show was the best-selling show they have ever hosted in the space.

Lisa Brunetta - Solo show at Espace Pierre-Debain in Aylmer QC

The New Art Festival, Central Park, Ottawa

If you are an artist and are scoping out a good summer outdoor show in Ottawa, this one should be at the top of your list. A high-quality show in the heart of the Glebe. This year the show took place on June 5th and 6th.

The show is always well-attended - even this year, despite the rainy weekend. Many a customer braved the less-than ideal weather conditions to stroll the aisles, meeting the talented artists both from the local area and from farther afield.

I had a great good fortune to have wonderful neighbours, including David Taylor, who won the show's photography award for his amazing work, and Paul Sharp, a painter/collage artist who gave me wonderful marketing advice on my copper flocks.

Apartment613, a local art and culture blog, took some shots of the event, including my art, and combined them into a slideshow. You can view it at New Art Festival: Photos from Central Park

Dragons and other Flags at the Gatineau Dragon Boat Festival

The weekend of June 26 found me, my family and my Dragon sculpture volunteering at the Gatineau Dragon Boat festival, making flags from recycled materials with the children there. I came up with a fun Dragon design. The races raise funds for Centre C.A.R.M.E.N., a complimentary treatment centre offering free services to chronically ill patients and their families.

Dragon Flags made from recycled materials

Recycl'art Opening Day in Montpellier QC

The photo at the top of this post is my submission this year for Recycl'Art, one of the most interesting sculpture exhibitions I participate in. All sculptures must be made from at least 80% recycled materials to qualify for this juried show.

The show runs from July 10 to October 3, 2010. Take the drive to Montpellier - you won't regret it!

The artists from Recycl'Art 2010

An Artist's Residency in the Pontiac

From July 12 to 16 I participated in the Pontiac Artists Association's first ever Artist's Residency week. Artists from the region opened their homes and hosted artists like me for the week. Each day we visited tourist attractions in the Pontiac region, and then returned to the magnificent home base of Geraldine Classen (my gracious host!) to work together and share our expertise. It was an excellent experience, and one I hope the Association decides to continue.

Geraldine Classen's excellent barn studio

Kempenfest in Barrie, Ontario

This weekend I'm heading to Barrie, Ontario - my home town - to participate in my second year of the Huronia Festival of Arts and Crafts, part of the larger Kempenfest. Here's a little nugget of information to close out this giant post - I'm moving to Barrie for September of this year! Maybe I'll see you this weekend.

Lisa Brunetta on Regional Contact - Showcasing my recycled art

My feature on Regional Contact aired on Saturday, February 5, 2010. The Olympics have since started so I have the bonus of being top of the list for at least a couple of weeks on Regional Contact`s Internet Page.

If you didn`t catch the show when it aired, go check it out online!

Regional Contact filming in my studio

I got a call last week from Kathie Donovan from Regional Contact, a show on our local television station, CTV Ottawa. The show interviews local people with interesting stories - artists, musicians, craftspeople, winter camping enthusiasts - you get the idea. It's a half hour show with two segments per show and has been running in the area for thirty years. It's very popular and people love it.

I was delighted to participate, so she came down last week to Arthéna, the shop/gallery where I work, to interview me and shoot some pictures of my work. She returned today, to my home studio, to take some footage of me making things and to get pictures of the larger sculptures. I had a blast!

My studio was completely taken over with lights, tripods, and wires snaking everywhere.

And I asked nicely and Kathie and her cameraman, Peter, were kind enough to pose for a picture with me. Here we are.

Kathie will be back in touch when the program airs. And it will be on their website for a little while - I'll post a link when I find out more.

My sculpture decorates the CRCO website pages!

Look what I found when I was browsing today! The Conseil régional de la culture de l'Outaouais (think Council for the Arts in Ottawa, but on the Quebec side) has just launched their new and improved website. They have a series of images that cycle through as you browse through their pages. My Dragon is one such image - with the added bonus of having a clearly legible name tag! Most excellent. This has made my day.

Art on my head!

I keep forgetting that there are loads of people who haven't yet seen my new hairdo. I find it helps me embody artsyness!

I brought in a handful of autumn leaves to the colorist and the DVD of the movie "Amélie" to the hairstylist the get the colour and cut I was looking for and I'm thrilled that both of them were so delighted to do it for me, instead of trying to talk me out of it.

Here I am with my new Autumn leaves 'do. I love it! Thanks to Crystal and Kevin at the Fluid Colour Concept Salon in Ottawa for helping me realize my hair vision.

And a shot of me at work at Arthéna - a good view of the hairdo from the side - check out the bright orange stripe that frames my face:

Glass Beadmaking at the Haliburton School of the Arts

Every year since 1997 I've been driving to Haliburton, Ontario (a little village about an hour north of Peterborough and just on the southernmost border of Algonquin Park) for my week-long getaway at the Haliburton School of the Arts. Yes, going to Art school for six and a half hours a day, five days in a row is my idea of a vacation. I love it!

This year I was originally registered for a Business for Artists course. I was really looking forward to it as it was going to discuss tricks and tips for grant writing (my next thing to attack!). However, it got cancelled due to low registration. So I signed up for glass beadmaking instead and had a ball.

Glass beadmaking involves melting rods of differently coloured glass in the flame of a torch, winding the molten glass rods around a stainless steel stick and using the flame to make various shapes. Here's a shot of my work surface with the torch, some glass rods, shaping tools, stainless steel buckets of water for scrap and those stainless steel winding rods (the things that look like unlit sparklers – the gray stuff is called bead release and allows you to slip the bead off the winding rod once it has cooled down. Without bead release, you can't get the bead off and you end up with a nice plant stick – hee hee!


Here are my beads from the first day – looks like a bouquet, doesn't it? The red tips are so I can tell my beads from the beads of others. All the beads, once completed, go into a kiln (a really hot oven) to cool down slowly to room temperature to avoid thermal shock and cracking. Confusion and inadvertent bead theft can occur without the marking.


There are two main kinds of glass in bead making, commonly referred to as “soft glass” and “hard glass”. Melting temperature is lower for soft glass, and the colour you see in glass rod form is what you will get once you're done forming the bead in the torch. However, soft glass is more sensitive to changes in temperature (and more prone to cracking if you're not careful to keep it evenly warm while you're working).

The hard glass is called borosilicate glass and is the same stuff Pyrex bakeware and scientific test tubes are made with. It has a higher melt temperature and is much less prone to cracking because of uneven warming, so you can make more complicated things. My instructor, Brad Sherwood, makes these really cool glass marionettes out of this glass, with jointed jaws and limbs. The other cool thing about borosilicate glass is the colour variations you can get out of the glass by varying the heat applied to your bead.

Here is a beautiful pendant and matching tiny beads I made on my last day of class. Those tiny beads have fantastic swirls of colours and hints of metallic tinting. They didn't go into the kiln at all – their small size allowed me to prop them up on my tabletop to air cool with no ill effects. And I got all fancy when I was winding them on the stainless steel rods – instead of only one bead per rod, I wound four or five to each rod, creating quantities of beads in a very short time.


As you can see, I had great fun, as usual. I highly recommend this art school. Haliburton is able to attract excellent instuctors, and their course catalogue is large and varied. So go create!