If you haven’t got your tickets yet, now is the time to do it! Get them HERE
or visit the box office at the theatre:
Richmond Hill Centre for the Performing Arts,
10268 Yonge Street
Richmond Hill, ON – Canada
Over 150 of our finalists’ watercolours from over 80 countries around the world have been selected from both our ‘A Symphony in Watercolour’ and our ‘150 Ways to Celebrate’ Exhibitions and will be projected on a huge screen behind the Richmond Hill Philharmonic Orchestra as they play a selection of music inspired by art and nature, which embraces cultural diversity. We will also have two master artists Andy Sookrah and Bonnie Steinberg interpreting the music live as we listen and watch. It is an evening not to be missed!
Art and music bring people together regardless of race, religion, culture, or distance. Let’s embrace that together!
The eBook is suitable for Amazon Kindle Fire®, Apple iPad®, Android devices, and Mac or PC computers. You’ll need to carefully follow the instructions in the email you’ll get (there are different links depending on what you want to read it on) and wait patiently for it to download. It is 151 MB in size (at least for the desktop version). Keep in mind, you have to have an ebook reader application on your desktop iMac if you want it to work there.
Our brave leader Ona Kingdon has been extremely busy these past few days, moving our exhibit out of Boynton House, re-organizing, and putting a selection of the paintings up at Richmond Hill Centre for the Performing Arts in the Foyer, Lower East Side and Upper East Side Galleries (click for HOURS), in anticipation of the concert which will be held there to close the exhibit on October 27. Luckily she had some help from Tiina Price, Nola McConnan and Michelle Zikovitz for the physical work!
The paintings selected were those of the award winners, the invited guests, and people who contributed significantly to the event.
It’s lovely to see that no matter where we put this exhibit, whether it is in a heritage building with a homey, comfortable atmosphere, or in a modern, sophisticated theatre, the watercolour paintings look beautiful and add so much to the space they are in. See for yourself!
Here is how the exhibit looked at Boynton House:
Just before the opening…
And here is how it looks at the Richmond Hill Centre for the Performing Arts:
Two weeks ago during the opening celebrations of our A Symphony in Watercolour Exhibit, the awards given by the jurors Peter Marsh CSPWC, OSA, SCA, TWS, Anne McCartney CSPWC, AWS, TWSA and Rainbow Ze (youth juror) were announced. We are so grateful for all ofour sponsors and the numerous prizesthat we were able to give out!
They are listed below – keep scrolling for a gallery of the winning images:
The CSPWC Grand Prize for Best in Show – Lana Privitera USA Some Wrinkles to Iron The IWS Canada Youth Award – Yong-Ching , Jhang Taiwan Smile at the age of 19
Rockwell Art Supplies/Eureka Award 1 – Roy Tibbits Canada Winter Sentinels Rockwell Art Supplies/Eureka Award 2 -Moe Win Myanmar Padaung Old Woman Rockwell Art Supplies/Eureka Award 3 – Conny Jager Canada Under the L
Daniel Smith Colors of Inspiration Award – William Rogers Canada Matinee Duel Daniel Smith Designers Award – Kashinath Das India View of Chandni Chowk, Delhi Daniel Smith New Colors Award – Anna Ivanova Russia Bayaders
The DeSerres Award -Anthony Saldutto Canada Rays QoR Modern Watercolor by GOLDEN Award – Corinne Izquierdo France Pecheur du Sud Rosemary & Co Brush Award – Richard Tiejun Chao Australia A Thinker
Da Vinci Paint Co Awards:
1. Jacques Villares Spain Madrid 70’s
2. Jansen Chow Malaysia Night Market
3. Jose Apaza Mexico Cantera (quarry)
4. Mykhailo Rychkov Ukraine Evening in Quebec
5. Yelena Iokton Kazakhstan Hunter
Escoda Brushes Awards:
1. Barbara Eguchi Canada Rhythms of Kensington
2. Sun Jiangang China The stone beach under the sun
3. Shan raza amrohvi Pakistan Buzkashi game 2
Richmond Hill Creative Eye Love and Peace Awards:
1. Mohammad ali Yazdchi Iran White Flowers
2. Barbara Farren Canada Sleeping at the Airport
3. Gail Sutherland Canada D’Aubins Cove
4. Shirin Nematzadeh Iran Pink flowers
To view images as a slideshow, click on one and then use arrow cursor keys.
Lana Privitera – USA.
Some Wrinkles to Iron. 15×22″.
Yong-Ching , Jhang – Taiwan Youth.
Smile at the age of 19. 14×21″.
Roy Tibbits – Canada.
Winter Sentinels. 15×22″.
Moe Win – Myanmar.
Padaung old woman. 15×22″.
Conny Jager – Canada.
Under the L. 17.5×13.5″.
William Rogers – Canada.
Matinee Duel. 11×15″.
Kashinath Das – India.
View of Chandni Chowk ,Delhi. 11×15″.
Anna Ivanova – Russia.
Bayaders. 22×15″.
Anthony Saldutto – Canada.
Rays. 11×15″.
Corinne Izquierdo – France.
Pecheur du Sud. 19×11″.
Richard Tiejun Chao – Australia.
A Thinker. 15×22″.
Jacques Villares – Spain.
Madrid 70’s. 15×22″.
Jansen Chow – Malaysia.
Night Market. 15×22″.
Jose Apaza – Mexico.
Cantera (quarry). 15×22″.
Mykhailo Rychkov – Ukraine.
Evening in Quebec. 11×15″.
Yelena Iokton – Kazakhstan.
Hunter. 11×15″.
Barbara Eguchi – Canada.
Rhythms of Kensington. 11×15″.
Sun Jiangang – China.
The stone beach under the sun. 15×22″.
Shan raza amrohvi – Pakistan.
Buzkashi game 2. 12×15″.
Mohammad ali Yazdchi – Iran.
white flowers. 15×22″.
Barbara Farren – Canada.
Sleeping at the Airport. 15×22″.
As noted in our last post, the entire exhibit is currently located at Boynton House in Richmond Hill (at Richmond Green). The exhibit at Boynton House will close as of October 15, when all paintings will be taken from there, and some will be selected to relocate to the Richmond Hill Centre for the Performing Arts.
In the meantime, there is plenty to enjoy at Boynton House and it would certainly be worth your while to get there before the end of this weekend! Our exhibit has been so popular that over 1100 people have visited as of Tuesday afternoon!
View the now over 90 paintings on exhibit, (combining those from Burr House as well.)
Experience the magic of Ona Kingdon painting live daily.
Try a watercolour activity this weekend.
See IWS Canada’s “Love Around the World” paint video preview.
Come join in the celebration of watercolour!
Notes from last weekend:
We had a wonderful day today letting the children of our local community in Richmond Hill experiment with Watercolour. Hope you enjoy looking through our Symphony in Watercolour Children’s album, just a small selection from all the paintings created at Boynton House on Richmond Green on Saturday the 6th and Sunday 7th October:
Thank you to Da Vinci Paint Co. for providing a few of your dot palettes for the children to experiment with. They LOVED creating their own #DaVinciMoment and to DeSerres for providing the paper for this activity. You are both AWESOME sponsors of our Symphony in Watercolour.
Just a note to keep everyone apprised of the current locations of our ‘A Symphony in Watercolour’ international exhibit. While up until today, paintings were at two locations, Boynton House and Burr House in Richmond Hill, the ones at Burr House are moving today to Boynton House, so that the entire exhibit will be located there.
Later on in the month, some of the paintings will be moving to the Richmond Hill Centre for the Performing Arts, in anticipation of the special performance there at the end of the month (October 27).
Richmond Hill’s Pumpkin Fest is on all weekend from 10 am to 6 pm. The exhibit at Boynton House will be open today and tomorrow from 10 am to 5 pm. A perfect outing for everyone. Please click the links in this post for more information about Pumpkin Fest. And then please come and visit us in Boynton House as well. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
For all of our exhibition hours, please click this LINK.
International Artists Gather For Cultural Event in Richmond Hill
Tomorrow, watercolour artists from all over the globe will gather in Richmond Hill, Ontario, just north of Toronto, to celebrate the opening of ‘A Symphony in Watercolour’.
The exhibition, jointly presented by the International Watercolour Society of Canada (IWS Canada) and the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour/La Société Canadienne De Peintres En Aquarelle (CSPWC/SCPA), will feature the work of 95 watercolour artists from Canada and around the world. From a total of 320 entries from 32 countries who entered the competition earlier this year, 80 finalists were juried into “A Symphony in Watercolour” by Anne McCartney CSPWC, Peter Marsh CSPWC, and Rainbow Ze (youth juror). The other 15 artists are winners from last year’s IWS Canada online exhibition and attending jurors, as well as presidents and vice-presidents of the presenting societies.
The five day festival opening the exhibit will continue the next day with a presentation merging painting, video and photography by renowned artist David McEown, winner of IWS Canada’s 2017 online competition ‘150 Ways to Celebrate’, a Canada 150 event. This presentation will take place at Richmond Hill Central Library as part of the Canada-wide Culture Days event. In addition, “Experiment with Watercolour” activities will be set up so the public can try it out.
Other activities for the five day festival include field trips to various places in the area for plein air painting, photography, and general tourist enjoyment, such as the Oak Ridges Moraine, Black Creek Pioneer Village, the David Dunlap Observatory, Toronto Island, and the CN Tower 360 restaurant. Some of these activities are free, others will have costs associated with them. Of special note is a field trip to the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, which the gallery is providing to the IWS Canada and CSPWC/SCPA group as a sponsored event for this festival. Further information for all of these activities is available at IWSCanada.ca.
A very special part of this exhibition will be a live performance by the Richmond Hill Philharmonic Orchestra, called ‘Symphonic Watercolours’, which will take place to close the exhibit, on October 27, 2018, at 8 p.m. A slide show of the beautiful watercolour art in the exhibit will accompany music specially selected to enhance its viewing. In addition, live interpretive painting will be performed by Andrew Sookrah and Bonnie Steinberg. The theatre will also display a selection of actual paintings from the exhibit. It will truly be ‘A Symphony in Watercolour’.
Where: Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada – various venues – mainly Boynton House and Burr House
Who: The International Watercolour Society of Canada (IWS Canada) (A Branch of the International Watercolor Society (IWS Globe)) and the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour/La Société Canadienne De Peintres En Aquarelle (CSPWC/SCPA)
When: September 28 to October 27, 2018
What: ‘A Symphony in Watercolour’ – an international exhibit and festival of watercolour art
Why: To celebrate the medium of watercolour, and how diverse cultures can be brought together through their enthusiasm for common interests, while appreciating their differences.
The painting in the featured graphic at the top, Colour of Music, is by one of our jurors, Anne McCartney CSPWC, AWS, TWSA
The painting in this graphic is ‘Inner Symphony’ by Ona Kingdon, CSPWC, NWS, TWSA, IWS Master – President of IWS Canada. (Subject is Jessica Kun, the artistic director of the Richmond Hill Philharmonic Orchestra.)
IWS Canada would like to once again sincerely thank our sponsors!
Located on 100 acres of forested land along the Humber River, the McMichael is a major public gallery uniquely devoted to collecting The Art of Canada.
The McMichael’s permanent collection consists of over 6,500 artworks by Tom Thomson, the Group of Seven, their contemporaries, First Nations, Métis, Inuit and contemporary artists who have contributed to the development of Canadian art.
We will be visiting the gallery on Monday, October 1, 2018 as part of our Five Day Celebration Event to open our exhibit ‘A Symphony in Watercolour’ at Boynton House and Burr House in Richmond Hill, Ontario. The gallery has generously sponsored this field trip for us – thank you McMichael Gallery!
For more information about our entire event please visit our home page.
We are really excited to count down the days to go until the festival begins! In case you haven’t visited the website lately, we have a whole bunch of information available on the home page, and also on the exhibit page. But we thought we’d put a lot of it in this blog post anyway!
First: here is the poster our sponsor Focal Designs designed for us. Thank you Focal Designs!
If you click on the link above you’ll see the poster – these will be on display all over Richmond Hill and further afield. We are hoping that some kind souls might choose to print one copy themselves and help us out with our advertising!
Second: A map of where it is all happening can be found here. The map includes the two exhibit locations:
Boynton House & Richmond Green
1300 Elgin Mills Road East
Richmond Hill, ON L4S 1M5
Burr House Gallery & Tea Room
528 Carrville Rd,
Richmond Hill, ON L4C 6E6
The ribbon cutting occurs at noon at Boynton House and Richmond Green on September 28. We will have some music at 2:30, then awards and speeches at 3:00 pm. The exhibition paintings at Boynton House will of course be available all afternoon until 5:00 pm, and many of the master painters will be attending. Throughout the afternoon there will be opportunities for plein air painting. Also, there will be representatives from Winsor & Newton, QoR Watercolours, Daniel Smith, DeSerres Art Store, Da Vinci paints and RockWell Art Supplies demonstrating products.
At 6:00 pm, the opening day will continue at Burr House where the rest of the exhibition paintings will be on display. Tea and scones will be available, and you can observe the local spinners and weavers at work in this heritage building. Our opening day will end at 8:00 pm.
You’ll find the locations of all the festivities happening during the Five Day Celebration Event (September 28-October 2), and the location of the Richmond Hill Centre for the Performing Arts, which is where the concert “Symphonic Watercolours” is being performed by the Richmond Hill Philharmonic Orchestra on October 27, to close the show, on the MAP.
Third: here is most of the event information briefly summarized in one graphic suitable for sharing on social media.
Painting is ‘Inner Symphony’ by Ona Kingdon, CSPWC, NWS, TWSA, IWS Master – President of IWS Canada. (Subject is Jessica Kun, the artistic director of the Richmond Hill Philharmonic Orchestra.)
Fourth: here is a summary of the information for the Five Days of Festivities:
Painting is ‘Colour of Music’ by Anne McCartney, CSPWC, AWS, TWSA – one of the jurors for ‘A Symphony in Watercolour’.
Fifth: A more detailed outline of the Five Day Celebration Event is here.
Remember – you are invited, and so are your friends, and their friends… please tell them all about it.
IWS Canada 