NOTL artists featured on studio tour this weekend

Art in Wine Country is a weekend-long Niagara-on-the-Lake artists’ studio tour, featuring a vibrant community of 28 professional artists and artisans who are opening their studios and shared venues for everyone: the curator and collector, the aspiring artist, and the simply curious.

The Local had an opportunity to meet with one artist, Alison Fardoe, in her Lakeshore Road O Studio Gallery as she prepared for the tour.

Fardoe holds an honours diploma in fine arts from the Ontario College of Art and Design, and studied drawing, painting, sculpture and jewellery-making before independent study in Florence, Italy. Much of the art she has chosen for the tour incorporates the oak leaf.

“For years I’ve been inspired by oak trees, wanting to capture the beauty of their leaves in my art,” said Fardoe. “But it was not until I moved here that I discovered how richly symbolic these trees were to the Niagara region’s identity and history.”

Fardoe moved to NOTL from Toronto with her partner in 2020 to both be closer to her parents and to nature. Surrounded by paintings belonging to the Oak series, Fardoe talked about being drawn to oak leaves as a child, which she described as “seashells on the forest ground,” before she was drawn to arts and crafts-finished quarter-sawn oak furniture early in her career.

Oak trees “are just so beautiful. Every leaf is different on an oak tree, particularly, I love the white oaks,” she said.

For the Oak series, Fardoe worked in a variety of media and dimensions using an acrylic polymer resin. She made stencils from oak leaves, and used both the positive and the negative part of the stencils, built up layers and then painted them.

“These leaves are all mainly from this 400-year old tree, just down the road from me,” explained Fardoe. The white oak she mentioned has been recognized as a heritage tree by the Trees Ontario Heritage Tree Program.

Fardoe noted that the oak plays prominently in NOTL lore: the Niagara Parks logo sports an oak leaf, the defunct Parliament Oak Public School where members of Parliament conducted business under the shade of an oak, and the white oak boundary marker that was planted on the first land deed in Upper Canada.

She loves the ancient oaks in Paradise Grove by the Commons, and Oak Street in historic Chautauqua. She also discovered White Oaks Resort and Spa and Royal Oak School.

But you will see more than oak leaves at O Studio. Inspired by observing terns plunge-diving for fish in the wetland across from their home, Fardoe “saw how the light caught their wings” and they have become the subject of a new series of oil paintings. “You could say that I tern-ed a new leaf,” she joked.

The Arts in Wine Country tour offers three suggested routes: The South Route, which includes Glendale and St. Davids, the Central Route up Niagara Stone Road through to the Old Town, and the North Route, which includes Lakeshore Road and a firelane.

The tour is free, June 1 and 2, between 10 a.m.  and 5 p.m. Meet the artists and download a map at www.notlstudiotour.com.