Jay Anderson is one of eight local artists who spent the last year painting and sculpting the back alleys of the city.
For the past year, eight local artists painted Ottawa’s back alleys. The dumpsters and blue bins, the telephone poles and wires, the children slipping through back streets to get home from school and the frequent dog walkers who use these gloomy spaces – they’ve painted it all.
Until May 1, their art will be on display at Cube Gallery on Wellington Street West, in a group exhibit called Ottawa Alleyways.
Every Friday morning, the group meets for breakfast at Stan’s Diner, a truck-stop diner just off of Innes Road. They discuss their week, they divvy up the unpainted alleyways and they talk about what they’ve seen and learned.
“The amount of work we do that day all depends how long breakfast lasts,” says Jay Anderson, one of the local back-alley artists.
Throughout the year, they’ve painted a number of the Centretown back alleys including the space behind Barrymore’s and Bridgehead at Bank and Gilmour, Florence and Bank laneways, James at Bank near the James Street Pub and the O-Train tracks at Preston Street.
The Barrymore’s sign makes it into two of Anderson’s paintings. She says she painted that particular alley because she loved the way the sign peeked through the other buildings. “So much happens there,” she says.
Each piece of art is named by the intersection or alleyway. This way, people will always be sure of exactly where the location is. “People want to see it from where you were,” says Anderson. “They want to see it how the artist saw it.”
And the group has seen it all.
“You wouldn’t believe the things people keep in their backyard,” says Strachan Johnston, who’s been painting since he retired from his job as a public servant. His mom was an artist too; he used to clean her paintbrushes as a child. “We’ve learned to paint blue boxes and telephone poles very well.”
The back-alley artists hope their art can act as a keepsake of how the city looks now. The group admits that on some Fridays, while they paint, onlookers will ask them to paint their house or their corner, so that they, too, can have a keepsake.
Not only does the art help to preserve the city, it also helps the artists appreciate where they live. Pina Manoni-Rennick grew up in Bassano Romano, Italy, just a short drive from Rome. She says she loved painting in Italy because of all the old buildings and the history. When she moved to Canada as a teenager, she hated all the telephone poles and wires hanging in the sky.
“Here, I saw only ugly, and now I pay attention to them and love them,” she says.
“Doing the lanes and alleyways of Ottawa opened my eyes and made me realize what a wonderful city Ottawa is; there is a lot of history here too.”
In the past year, each of them has completed up to 15 paintings. Some paint with acrylic, some with oil, and Karl Schutt makes sculptures of the alleyways with copper and silver as his medium.
“We all do the same thing, but it’s so different,” says Manoni-Rennick. “It’s so exciting to see it come together finally.”
“But we could go on for another year,” adds Anderson. “We haven’t painted half of what we saw.”
The current show follows their exhibit called Champlain Lookout from the previous year, when they all painted from the Gatineau Park lookout for the entire year, capturing the views from different angles and in different seasons.
They will spend this upcoming year painting the waterways of Ottawa.