GUYSBOROUGH — Former Boston high school principal Jack Leonard – now living in Boylston – recalls, with ringing clarity, how he never seemed to have enough money in his budget to hire an arts instructor.
“So, I contracted with a private citizen to come in on a weekly basis to do art with some of the students. It’s the only way I could do it,” he remembers.
Now, the retired educator, president of ArtWorks East – a collective of more than 60 local creators of everything from pen and ink drawings to crocheted bucket hats – is applying his extracurricular approach, with help from the provincial government, to enrich the lives of some Guysborough County children and their parents.
With a $10,000 grant (he prefers not to formally identity the department until the funding announcement becomes official), Leonard has embarked on a community project to supplement local public schools’ arts programming.
“What we want to do is offer four workshops each in five different communities,” he explains. “We [haven’t] really pinned the communities down. It could be Guysborough, Canso, Whitehead, Larry’s River, New Harbour. In each one of those communities, we [will] offer two workshops for younger children, aged five to 10, and two workshops for older children.”
The first session is free and, “If you want to come back and do the second one, it might be $10, or something like that … What were trying to do is make contact with families, to find out who has kids, who wants visual arts instruction for their kids, and who might be willing to continue with us on a long-range basis.”
Some evidence suggests there is, indeed, a need.
“We’ve been wrestling with the fact that there’s not a whole lot of arts instruction in the school in Guysborough for awhile now,” Leonard says. “I presume it’s the same in Canso. I know there is a music teacher, which is amazing. I think [visual arts] its kind of very occasional.” He adds, “We’ve had requests from parents and families for instruction in the arts. So, we wrote the grant thinking, ‘Well, let’s explore how much interest there is out there.’”
Participants can expect to learn the fundamentals of visual arts – shading, colour theory, perspective – in a variety of genres, including watercolours, acrylics and oils. But, more than this, he says: “We’re going to ask our facilitators to spend a little bit of time introducing students to well-known Canadian artists of their choice. So, if they are down in Tor Bay doing these classes, they might look for Acadian artists, or if they are in Lincolnville or Sunnyville, they might look for African Canadian artists.”
As for those “facilitators,” he says: “We have at least seven members [of ArtWorks East] who are interested in doing this. They’re all skilled artists who have been trained in these things themselves. And they’ve said they want to participate.”
The grant will compensate them, according to rates suggested by Canadian Artists’ Representation/Le Front des artistes canadiens (CARFAC), a federally incorporated non-profit corporation for professional visual artists in Canada.
Says Leonard: “If we found, for example, half a dozen families up in Canso, who really want this because they all have kids between six and 12, then we would try to find ways to continue instruction on a regular basis. That might mean another grant or just, you know, negotiating with them on how much they’d be willing to pay for regular arts instruction … People are very used to spending money for hockey and things like that. But, we think there are some families out there that would pay for the arts instruction their kids aren’t getting in school.”
For more information about the program and how to get involved, contact ArtWorks East at info@artworkseast.ca or on Facebook.
Alec Bruce, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Guysborough Journal
