Young at art

MIRIAM HILL

Beth McKenty’s smile couldn’t be any wider.

She has just received a very special card in the mail — an invitation from an art gallery in Vancouver adorned with a picture of an inuksuk created by six-year-old Samuel Kilabuk of Iqaluit.

Kilabuk, along with some other city children, have been painting with McKenty at her Iqaluit home on the weekends for the past two years.

Drawn to the North by the high suicide statistics, McKenty, 70, began inviting children into her house to paint, since there was no centre for them to use. The young artists were given a dish with the three primary colours and told to just paint whatever they wished.

Some of the results of those painting sessions are now on display at the Marion Scott Gallery in Vancouver, B.C.

Proceeds from the sale of the art will fund camping trips for youth and elders on the land.

The Arctic Youth Art Initiative, funded by the Department of Culture, Language, Elders, and Youth; the Royal Canadian Legions and its Women’s Auxiliary; as well as the Royal Bank, helps pay for the materials, and helped McKenty search for a gallery willing to show the work.

“For a year and a half, I didn’t have the vision of this turning into something that would bring back funds to help the youth. Just the process of learning to paint would be good, but now this has its own energy,” McKenty says, obviously pleased as punch.

She holds the card near her chest and beams about the artist, Samuel Kilabuk.

“He’s just a tiny little boy and he’ll come to paint and he’ll paint two or three things and he’ll say, ‘Finished. Time to play.’ It’s lovely because the whole point is that they just see that they have talent and be happy,” she says.

Judy Kardosh owns the Vancouver gallery, which is selling the Christmas card-sized prints for $10 each, $25 for three, or $100 for 15. The gallery is displaying 115 of the pieces, which range in size from about four to six inches.

While the invitation cards had only gone out days before the interview, Kardosh says the gallery has already raised more than $1,000.

“They look quite nice on the wall because they’re all clumped together. We’ve got over 100 mounted on some cardboard on the wall with the Arctic Youth Art Initiative sign above it,” she says on a sunny Vancouver afternoon. “They really look delightful and colourful.”

She says she’s wanted to involve the gallery in this kind of project for a long time.

Every year at Christmas, the gallery is solicited to make contributions to various charities involving children in the South.

She says she doesn’t mind contributing, since it’s part of her duty as a working citizen.

“But it’s always slightly bothered me that I’m using funds generated from the North for children in the South,” she admits.

“I think this is a great idea, though. I hope it’s going to become a trans-Arctic project eventually and that maybe more galleries will become involved.”

McKenty says the gallery will send one cheque at the end of December, with the money going to David Serkoak, the principal at Iqaluit’s Joamie School, to plan and organize trips on the land for youth and elders.

“It’s to be offered widely so that any Inuit children who are interested — in Iqaluit — will have a chance to go,” McKenty says. She says other communities may also get a chance to offer similar programs.

She has been invited to paint with children in Cape Dorset and Clyde River, and she says she’s confident that other galleries will show art from those communities.

In the meantime, though, McKenty will continue to encourage children and those young at heart to paint — just paint.

“There’s some about this simple process of using red, yellow, and blue and mixing their own colours. It just seems to bring out a lot in anyone,” she says.