In which the story begins – with a 400th anniversary…
In 2009 I was beginning work on a new publication entitled the Georgina Book, a history in images and prose of the area where I live.
For one of the chapters that I was writing I needed to interview the Executive Director of the Georgina Art Gallery, Heather Fullerton. We got on well, and with her enthusiastic encouragement – and the support of the entire board of directors, who later attended all of my events! – I volunteered to create and present an art show. My vision was to have a show that would be fun, informative, exciting, interactive…and memorable.
This developed, over the next eight years, into two series of shows, a large number of art history classes, musical events, initiatives with schools, and a lot of community participation.
I also loved to volunteer every week for years at front desk. This was the point of contact between the working life of the Art Centre and the people for whom art is a vital part of their day. I met wonderful people, many of whom are friends to this day.
Later in 2009 I was reading about the imminent quadricentennial of Merisi, or to give him his full name, Michelangelo Merisi. Few people remember his name; not because he is unknown, but because history prefers to tell, not who his family was, but where they lived. He was born in a small and rather insignificant township in the north of Italy, called Caravaggio.
I decided that I would create my first art show in May 2010 around this seminal figure of baroque art.
The reaction of our first audience was encouraging; they asked for a further presentation as soon as possible. Steeve and I must have had nothing better to do because four weeks later we gave another show, this time on Toulouse-Lautrec (Comte Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa, what a great name!).
Some six weeks later we were back with a show about a guy named Leonardo Pieroson, from a town near Florence called Vinci (it was a coincidence that these three artists are remembered by the name of a town: Caravaggio, Vinci, Lautrec).
At first, we offered our presentations for free – we just wanted to share our knowledge and our passion with everyone. Our audience started to grow, and Heather Fullerton had the idea to sell tickets: why not create a little income for the gallery? At first we thought that if people had to pay they would not come, but to our greatest surprise our audience grew bigger! The gallery raised the price of the tickets, and suddenly we had full capacity audiences! Of course, Steeve and I volunteered, and all the money from ticket sales supported programming for children. Our audience demanded more shows, and these presentations became regular events. We even branched out into music concerts.
We called our presentation series Art Scandals, an easy decision because most artists led scandalous lives, and often enough the work they produced had scandalous overtones and undertones.
The exception was Invisible Women. Women artists were paragons of virtue compared to their male counterparts, even though some of their art was horrifically gory (some very realistic decapitations, for example). The scandal in their case was that they were ignored. Many times, they had to resort to having their paintings signed by a male in order to sell it.
‘What a beautiful Tintoretto!’
‘Actually, it’s a Tintoretta…’
This was a scandal that was not addressed until very recently, and is still a big topic of research.
By the end of 2010 we had done five shows, adding Invisible Women and Picasso to our catalogue, and our audience had expanded to around forty people.
