It’s that time of year again! I will be participating once again in our annual studio tour this weekend. Details are available at http://www.welcomebacktootterville.ca, or you can rely on what I’ve posted here and pick up a postcard when you arrive at my gallery. The postcards look like this and have a map and list […]
Welcome Back 2022 — LIANNE TODD
The above is from my other website and blog, inviting all interested parties to join us this weekend for our annual studio tour.
Today I will be setting up at South Gate Centre in Woodstock in preparation for this weekend’s Oxford Creates Art Expo, organized by Oxford Creative Connections, Inc. I will have several of my newest watercolour paintings available there, as well as a sampling of my fractal pieces. There will be many other artists, as well as authors, exhibiting at this show.
In two weeks, I will be opening my own gallery/studio doors to welcome the public for our 23rd annual studio tour here in Otterville: Welcome Back to Otterville. This will feature a much larger selection of my own work. We have a very good variety of stops this year with several new artisans! I will post again soon with more details about that.
For now, here are the details of both shows:
For even more information:
Oxford Creates: https://oxfordcreativeconnections.com/oxford-creates/
Welcome Back To Otterville: https://www.welcomebacktootterville.ca/
It is time again for those of us who are artists, artisans and specialty shopkeepers in the little town of Otterville, to open our doors and welcome visitors from all over Southwestern Ontario. This is our 20th year holding Welcome Back to Otterville, a studio tour that was founded by my good friend Sue Goossens years before I moved here, and continues to change and evolve as do the participants.
A press release for our tour follows – please feel free to publish the release as we are on a limited advertising budget! We are very grateful to Ashlyn Kernaghan for writing this up for us.
Welcome Back to Otterville Studio Tour Celebrates 20 Years
By Ashlyn Kernaghan
Glendale Student
On the weekend of November 19th and 20th, the artists and crafters who call the historic village of Otterville home will be opening up their doors for the 20th annual studio tour. Visit Otterville and browse through unique shops and studios. Meet the artists and experience a world of creativity. Studios and shops are open from 10am – 5pm and each day and the event is absolutely free to attend.
This year the studio tour includes 6 local artists – watercolours, oils, acrylics and mixed media – who will showcase the best of their best throughout the weekend in their homes or studios. The participating artists include Mae Leonard, Lianne Todd, Linda Hoffman, Trudy Verberne, Shirley Hokke, and Sue Goossens. In Bloom Designs featuring the jewellery of Jillian Driedger will be in the old general store in Hawtrey. Ralph Moore & Sons has a large selection of bird seed and feeders and all things bird! Shawn Pinnoy, owner of Styx and Skids, and Nordale Woodworking are new to the tour this year. Shawn Pinnoy creates up-cycled decor including wreaths, bird houses, barn board signs and much more. Nordale Woodworking, owned by Bryan Mertens, specializes in the production and sales of solid wood furniture and outdoor poly lawn furniture. Nordale Woodworking is open all year.
All participants on the tour live in Otterville and area and create their own unique products or own a shop in town. The event has evolved throughout the past 20 years with three of the original participants still on the tour – Sue Goossens, Linda Hoffman and Shirley Hokke.
“Artists truly enjoy meeting new visitors, old friends and sharing their passion for the arts.”
“Each year the tour attracts visitors from all over Southwestern Ontario from Windsor to Toronto,” said tour organizer Goossens. “People are always impressed with the quality of the artwork that is available. We have the reputation of having many accomplished artists in Otterville.”
This self-directed tour provides the opportunity to personally explore the creative approach of various artists, along with the chance to wrap up some Christmas shopping. Tour participants can visit as few or as many of the artists as they wish, over one or both days. The Otter Creek Golf Course club house will be open for lunch Saturday and Sunday.
Welcome Back to Otterville brochures and maps can be found at participating sites, the Station Arts Centre in Tillsonburg, and online at http://www.welcomebacktootterville.ca. Look for yellow flags that mark the studios.
Styx and Skids is not on the map, but can be found just around the corner from Linda Hoffman’s studio, on Grove St.
For more information call 519-879-6352 or visit www.welcomebacktootterville.ca
Here is the map of the tour. Hope you can make it out!
Some of you may not be familiar with Welcome Back to Otterville. Every year the little rural town I live in hosts a studio tour the third weekend in November. This is our 19th year. It’s one of the reasons we chose to settle ourselves here ten years ago rather than in some of the other nearby communities. Now I am so fully entrenched in the planning that I design the postcards and posters. My friend Sue Goossens is the founder and main planner though. She has done a lot of work over the years and we thank her! Otterville is full of artistic talent and many of the people on the tour are now long-time friends. Others are new on the tour this year and I look forward to meeting them… some other weekend maybe. 🙂
My studio/gallery, which is at the back of my house (go up the driveway and in through the patio doors from the deck), will be open from 10 am to 5 pm on Saturday November 21 & Sunday Nov 22, along with the other stops on the tour. Here is a convenient sampler of the stops, and here is a map to help you find us. Once you get here, yellow flags will act as markers to guide you. We also have a Facebook page you may like to follow. I will, of course, have my fractal art on display, as well as many of my more traditional watercolours. And, I will welcome you with hot cranberry wassail to help combat the colder weather.
See you then!
P.S. I kind of wish the tour was on a week or two ago, when the falls (steps from my house) looked like this.
Otter Falls, Otterville, ON KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA
It seems that the first weekend of May has crept up on me and while I’ve been posting about the Oxford Studio Tour on my Facebook page and my Twitter account (@artnaturali), and on my other website, I neglected to do so here! It’s this coming weekend already and I hope you haven’t made other plans yet.
I will be in my gallery/studio which is Stop #7 on the tour, to welcome you all this weekend. Visitors will be flocking to Oxford County, Ontario to view, enjoy, and purchase art. I have an abundance to show. Many of my fractal paintings, photos, and original single edition prints will be here, and many of my original paintings of other subjects. These include watercolour paintings on traditional paper, on gesso-coated paper, and on yupo. I will have two brand new fractal metal prints on display, as well as a new piece printed on acrylic! In addition to this, there will be some new fractal photos, and some new non-fractal pieces in watercolour. Brochures for the tour are available at a number of locations – including here at my studio! To get you started, here is a map to my location. I’m about an hour from Hamilton/Burlington, an hour from London, or an hour from Kitchener/Waterloo.
P.S. I accept cash and cheques for purchases of my art – but not credit cards, sorry! (There is an ATM at the Royal Bank just down the street though).
As you may know, if you have been reading all of my blog posts, I like to dabble a little in cosmology. Not that I really know anything about it, but it fascinates me, and I like the kind of abstract thought it stimulates. I was given a Great Course one Christmas on Dark Matter, Dark Energy, The Dark Side of the Universe, which I’ve enjoyed a great deal. Dr. Sean Carroll is great at explaining cosmology in a way that I, at least, can understand. I also read Brian Greene’s The Hidden Reality, a fascinating book. I subscribe to many Facebook Pages which post news about the latest pieces of knowledge in this field. The abstract thought appeals to me, and I think I’m pretty good at it, but my math and physics skills are limited to helping out my children when they were doing grade twelve homework. Which may be nothing to sneeze at, but is less than what is required for particle physics.
One of the things that really strikes me, is that the visual components, be they illustrations or actual data translated into an image, of almost every piece of news in cosmology, are recognizable to me as being fractal in nature. Perhaps it is because I’ve spent so much time looking at fractals, zooming in, and examining them from every angle, that I notice this. I am always mystified when no mention of fractals is made, in these cases. I’ve written a whole post (and another) about fractal dimensions before, so I won’t go into that here, but that’s another part of the puzzle I like to think about.
I know these two fractals don’t really illustrate anything in particular, but they make me think along the lines of particle physics, and stardust, and the early universe.
“Stardance”. Watercolour on gessoed paper. 20×20″.
$650.00
Lianne Todd
“Particles and Fields”.
Fractal Digital Art on Metal, single edition print. 20×20″.
$345.00
Lianne Todd
This past summer, during my exhibit, I was told about a person in the same city (London, Ontario) who, it seemed, had a lot of the same thoughts I was having about the fractal nature of the universe. She is a software engineer and has been studying fractals for much longer than I have! Needless to say, her math skills are much better than mine. I was fortunate to meet her (her name is Lori Gardi) this fall. She has two websites, the first of which I’m going to direct you to Here, in which she has laid out some of her thoughts in a pretty clear way. I’ll link you to the more recent one later… I think it’s a good idea to start at the beginning of her thought process. We (artists, software engineers, mathematicians, physicists, philosophers) may not all have the same thought processes or reach the same conclusions in our explorations of fractals and their role in the universe, but all avenues should be explored as long as they can exist within the rules that have been truly established by scientists and mathematicians in the past. I am, unfortunately, not capable of judging whether anything follows those rules, but others who can, need to at least look at this work with an open mind and decide for themselves. ESPECIALLY if it may help solve any of the mysteries still out there.
On the third weekend in November, every year, we hold a studio tour in my town. Otterville is a historic town located in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. This will be our 18th annual studio tour – we call it Welcome Back to Otterville – and every year the stops on the tour change slightly as the artists in town do. This year, there are eight stops on the tour, so it will be really easy to drive out, see all the stops, and return home if you live in, say, London, Kitchener/Waterloo, Stratford, or the western part of greater Toronto. It takes me less than an hour to drive to London, and about two hours to downtown Toronto, exactly an hour to Stratford. We aren’t on any major highway, but if you want directions please contact me and I’ll be happy to provide them.
If anyone reading this has been to my studio before, you will find this year quite different as I will be featuring my fractal work prominently. In fact, in the next few weeks I’ll be taking down all the art in my gallery at the rear of my house, and completely rearranging the walls to maximize the display. I always serve a lovely hot spiced cranberry punch during the tour, and I’m looking forward to the taste of it myself!
My gallery and studio are actually open all year to anyone who calls ahead or happens by on an afternoon when I’m home. I’ve just put a new sign out front (the old one suffered from weather damage) so you can easily find my location which is right on the Main Street downtown, just a few houses away from the historic mill and waterfall. Look for the yellow flags when you get here and use the map on the postcards (available at each stop) to help.
Here is some information for the tour, and a few photos.
If you find our Facebook page and “Like” us, or any of our posts, we would really appreciate the extra advertising and traffic that provides us – as you can imagine we are on a limited budget and every bit helps!
I made the news today – and while an actual review would have been nice, I will take free advertising without complaint! This article appeared on the front page of the Today section in The London Free Press, and I am grateful to them! Nice to be featured with these other excellent artists as well.
I have decided to post my own watermarked photo of the featured painting they chose for the article – it will give you a better idea of the colour. This is one of the five watercolours on gesso that are in the exhibit, and it’s called Colourfest. Like the others, it began as a digitally generated fractal, and developed from there.
Colourfest, 20×20″, Watercolour on Gessoed Paper. Lianne Todd
Another item of publicity is this video made by The ARTS Project. It was the end of the day we hung the show, so I hope I am not rambling too much in it. You can see Colourfest hanging behind me!
FractaLiArt 