To Lewis Lavoie, finishing a painting in front of a crowd of people is like a sport.
To Lewis Lavoie, finishing a painting in front of a crowd of people is like a sport.
If that’s the case, then doing a bunch of smaller paintings in front of a larger audience during a high profile international event could be considered the Olympics of painting.
The local painter was recently invited to conduct his regular show-stopping spectacle for an evening gathering to be held during the Summer Olympics in London in August. The provincial government invited several artists and performers to show off their skills during a three-day trade mission to highlight the best of the province.
“They really felt they needed something as a visual arts element. They felt that what would be great would be to have an Alberta artist come down and represent Alberta and do a live painting to show something Alberta,” he explained.
He’s done live paintings many times previously for charity and other promotional events.
“I pretty much do them every weekend,” he said.
He did it once for the Queen when she attended Alberta’s centennial celebrations at the Royal Alberta Museum. There is no denying that he has garnered a certain amount of fame and acclaim for these performances.
“I presented them my Mural Mosaic technique and I said I could create a 20-piece mural down there. They really liked that idea.”
Mural Mosaic is the art-based business that he founded with his partners, Phil Alain and his brother, Paul Lavoie. His technique generally sees him at the centre of the storm, trying to organize hundreds of smaller square paintings by other artists into a single larger image that would then become a mural installation.
Its most recent effort was Cultivate Life, a 216-panel measuring 7.3-metres by 9.1-metres, now on display in St. Albert Place and also on the Gaffney & McGreer Building at 20 Perron Street.
For the trade mission, Lavoie will do all of the work himself and in living colour as they say.
“I’m still working out all the details on how I can pull this off. It might be a big flop in the end,” he joked.
Sounding like he might have bitten off more than he could chew, he stated, “The live painting is probably the easy part; it’s pulling off a mural while I’m doing it, piecing it together. Hopefully it’ll be a mystery until the last panel goes in.”
He actually has two performances scheduled to take place on Aug. 1 and 3. He figures that this is more of a political event than a cultural one, so he expects to see lots of delegates, business people, and ambassadors.
Even though his attention will be fully engaged on his multiple canvases, Lavoie still hopes to catch glimpses of some of the athletes. Decathletes will probably have the greatest admiration for Lavoie’s ‘sportsmanship’.
“I’ll be painting up to 10 paintings at once. That will totally be new. The hardest part is putting your brush down and picking up the painting and putting it in place and then coming back and starting a brand new painting again. I’m just going like crazy trying to make it work. It’s got to look somewhat easy even though inside it’s a nightmare.”
