Chippewa Park’s historic carousel adorned with new artwork featuring iconic scenes from Thunder Bay area

Chippewa Park’s historic carousel has received an artistic refresh.

Students and staff at Superior Collegiate and Vocational Institute (CVI) in Thunder Bay have worked together to create new artwork for the carousel’s rounding boards — placed around the top of the carousel — featuring iconic scenes from Thunder Bay and northwestern Ontario.

“I was very intimidated at first just because it’s such a significant historical landmark,” said artist Faith Whatley, who’s contribution was an image of Quetico Park. “I went on it when I was a little kid and I was like, ‘I don’t wanna mess this up.'”

Whatley, a visual arts student at Lakehead University, got involved in the project through a co-op placement she did in a class taught be Keith Ailey, head of Superior CVI’s art department.

Ailey said the Friends of Chippewa Park group approached the school about the project.

“We brainstormed kind of a list of iconic images, because originally there were little wooden castles on here,” he said. “It was the same castle 16 times around.”

“They wanted to do something unique to Thunder Bay and they chose iconic images.”

The images include the Sleeping Giant, Terry Fox monument, Silver Islet Store, Kakabeka Falls, and Mount McKay.

The latter image was done by Superior CVI grad, and current Lakehead student, Anna McPherson.

“The paint was extremely hard to work with,” McPherson said. “It was very fast drying, it was difficult to blend, and I since I decided to do a sunset scene I was working with a lot of colours.”

“A lot of the process was trial and error, trying to figure out how things are blending and making sure that the colours work correctly, and it didn’t look too separated. There was a lot of redoing and repainting.”

That paint, Ailey said, is called 1 Shot, and is normally used for outdoor signs.

“It’s like equivalent to working with the enamel on your car, but doing it with a paint brush,” he said. “It’s not going to blend well, and it starts to dry almost immediately and kind of fading colours is, is next to impossible.”

In addition, the artists were limited to basic colours, like red, blue and yellow.

“But when I look at especially, like Mount McKay, the fade that she was able to get in the sky, it’s incredible,” Ailey said. “The colours that Anna mixed in that one are amazing.”

The challenges posed by the paint limited who was able to work on the pieces, Ailey said. For the most part, the actual painting was done by art teachers, with input from students in terms of colour and composition.

But even getting to the point of putting brush on panel was a process, as the carousel is one of just three in the world, said Iain Angus, project manager with the Friends of Chippewa Park’s Carousel Restoration Committee.

“We set up our own heritage advisory committee, but we also worked closely with the city’s heritage advisory committee, and any changes that we proposed had to go through them for permission,” Angus said.

The carousel was built in 1915, and the original images that adored the rounding boards were no longer re-creatable, Angus said.

“They’ve been painted over, they’ve been scratched and damaged,” he said. “We were told that we could replace them with iconic scenes of the Thunder Bay area.”

“We were locked into a particular colour scheme, the factory colour scheme, if you like, of 1915,” Angus said. “And we were locked into the type of paint that we had to use.”

Angus said the final results are “amazing.”

The rounding boards will be displayed at various events in the city over the winter, and then put back up on the carousel when it’s reassembled next summer.