We are still High on Ice!

Perhaps you would like to join us for a day of fun with ice - we hope you say yes! Come join us in “Finding your Creative Spirit”. All interested people are encouraged to attend, artistic ability or not, we will help you find your ability and spirit within.

The Fort St. John Community Arts Council in partnership with the City of Fort St. John present: the FSJ Ice Carving Workshop "Finding your Creative Spirit” on Saturday, February 11, 2012 at Centennial Park form 9 amd to 4 pm. Registration is only $25 and lunch is provided.

Instructor Jesse Forrester FSJs professional carving competitor for three consecutive years. He was born and raised in the Peace and has lead the local High On Ice team for the last five years in park and site preparations. He is an artist by hobby and a successful entrepreneur by trade. Jesse promises to provide hands on techniques and ice loads of fun.

Instructor Sonja Butts is one of FSJs most recognized artists and the local and professional judge for High On Ice for two consecutive years. She was born and raised in the Peace and has added to the beauty to our community with her art and continues to showcase her pieces. She is an artist at heart and a Director of the FSJ Community Arts Council. Sonja promises to share carving tips and help awaken your spirit with your artistic creations.

The registration deadline is Thursday, February 9th, 2012 so get your forms in and unlease your creative spirit on the ice!

A natural artistic gift, a lifelong love of art and a streak of perfectionism; this is the happy combination of traits that has made Sonja Butts one of Fort St. John’s most recognized artists. Her work can be seen on the walls of the Cultural Centre, on numerous Flower Pots, along the walking track at the Pomeroy Sports Centre, at North Peace Secondary School, and on the doors of Central School and the Christian Life Academy, just to name a few examples.  

From the time she was a little girl, watching her father doing wonderful drawings of horses, Sonja wanted to make pictures.  Her natural ability was obvious from an early age and was recognized by her teachers who encouraged the talented student.  After graduation she further developed her craft through the 2 year fine arts diploma program at Northern Lights College which, sadly, is no longer available.

Sonja made her presence felt on the local art scene early, and on a large scale, as one of the “Wall People”, a project for the 1984 BC Winter Games, featuring a series of sports related murals around the community.  This was followed up by a similar heritage mural project the following summer.

Painting, drawing and design remained an integral part of Sonja’s life in the years after that, in spite of the “distractions” of marriage, work and raising a family.  It would have been easy to allow art to fall by the wayside, overcome by the demands of a busy life, but Sonja continued to hone her skill, showing her work through membership in the original North Peace Art Group.   Technique and technical quality in her art has always been important to Sonja and she has taken great pride in strengthening her technical abilities through years of hard work and high standards.  Sonja the perfectionist is never far from the surface.

During those years of artistic development, Sonja also became involved with the Community Arts Council.  She speaks warmly of the positive influence that the Arts Council has had in her life, giving her opportunities to travel, to connect with other artists from around the community and the province, and to grow on a personal level.   Sonja is still a key member of the Arts Council, having served as its treasurer for many years.  She was in at the ground floor in the development of Ice and Snow Carving in the community, participating in the very first amateur competition.  As with her painting, her attention to detail and good technique led to outstanding results right from her very first sculpture, which, she recalls, was of a mermaid.  She and long-time friend, Julie Foster and her husband, Myles, have become one of the most successful local ice carving teams, placing first in the amateur division of High on Ice in 2009 and 2010.  She has no desire to make the jump to the professional competition, however, having developed a healthy respect for the physical demands of the higher level of carving competition.  In 2011 she took a break from carving to work alongside NICA professionals as part of the panel of judges, a role which she will take on again this year

Sonja credits her involvement with the Arts Council with building an awareness of the broader art community.  She found herself drawn to the look and sound of Bellydance and decided to give it a try.  Performance art in any form was something she had never, ever thought would come her way, but, as her skill in the dance technique has grown, so has her confidence, and she has come a long way since her first, absolutely terrifying, experience on stage.  She is now a member of the Mystic Borealis Bellydance group which performs a Tribal fusion style of dance; a blend of traditional Arabic bellydance with moves and costuming from other cultures and dance styles.

In spite of her widening range of artistic interests, painting remains Sonja’s first love and she has recently become a member of the Federation of Canadian artists, admitted to this organization, she thinks, on the strength of her most recent work; a series of water colour portraits.  She has always been drawn to the human face as a subject, loves the technical challenge of bringing life and realism to a portrait and sees herself taking on commissioned portraits in the near future.  Moving forward, she is striving to use her technical skills to reach another level of creativity and to evoke an emotional response while never compromising the visual quality of her paintings.  She is currently preparing work to submit the Federation of Canadian Artists for a show in May at the Peace Art Gallery, just another step in her pursuit of that perfect picture.  

Welcome to 2012, the year the Mayans gave up on calendars, life, the universe, and everything.  Well, not til December at least...which means we have 11 more issues of Northern Groove mag to go until, much like Y2K, nothing exciting happens and we sit around and wait for the next bit of nonsense about the end of everything to come around.