North Saanich artist Keith Levang will be giving a workshop coming up at the Saanich Peninsula Arts and Crafts Society (SPAC), and it’s all about giving artists a way to make their work their own.
“This course that I’m doing now I’m calling Building a Painting from the Ground Up,” he told the PNR.
Levang will be leading the group through some acrylic painting, and will show the people in his mini SPAC workshop the steps he goes through.
Levang currently paints landscapes and belongs to a plein air group called the Peninsula Plein Air Painters.
The group goes out once a week, finding different locations to paint.
“From those little paintings we do outdoors, I get ideas for larger paintings in the studio. Sometimes I take photographs and do sketches, so my work is pretty representational and pretty faithful to the scenes around here,” he said.
Levang, who was born in Vancouver, grew up in Burnaby and worked in Coquitlam as a high school art teacher for 32 years before heading to the Island.
He said in his past he was encouraged in high school by an art teacher to think about going to art school.
After a year of studying commercial art, he switched into fine art where he did painting, drawing, sculpture and more.
“It came graduation time and I thought, ‘well what am I going to do now,’ because it didn’t look too pretty a picture to make a living being a starving artist, so somebody suggested that I think about teaching,” he said.
Teaching, he said, was the last thing he wanted to do, but out of the sheer fact that nothing else came up, he headed in that direction and never looked back.
Levang moved to the Island 14 years ago, and became a member of SPAC upon his arrival.
“You meet all kinds of other people who are doing really interesting things in the arts and I love all the arts.”
The arts and crafts group gets all kinds of artists, painting in different media.
Levang said when one attends the workshops, they can usually pick up a few ideas to add to their bag of tricks.
“You have to learn the rules before you can break them and in art you don’t follow rules too stringently but you have to find your own way too, which is the most important thing I think.”