For artist Brenda Milne, her artwork began in her late teens, early twenties when she began painting using oils.
“I never did do water colour. I like the playing in it,” she told the PNR in her Sidney home, surrounded by her various artwork.
Now Milne prefers to work with sculptures as it’s very tactile work.
“You can get lots of textures and play around in it.”
Milne said she used to paint lots of landscapes along with people as she liked having that figurative element as part of the paintings. She now likes to pose her three-dimensional figures.
“The three-dimensional part is so neat because you’ve got different things happening on every angle,” she said, adding that she has little turn tables she puts them on so she can spin them to see what they look like.
Born in Saskatchewan, Milne moved to the Islamd to spend time with her daughter, helping with her children and began sculpting in their home, as she didn’t need much space.
She uses paverpol, which is like a white glue which she said is made with recycled t-shirts or gauze or anything that’s 100 percent natural fibre. She will then soak it and drape it.
“So you make a stick figure out of wire and you use tape and tinfoil to bulk it, to give it muscle or a little more thickness, and then you pose it and figure out how you want it to be,” she said about her process.
Milne creates a lot of garden work, with fairies sitting atop mushrooms, made with chicken wire and tinfoil and even poured cement. She will then use acrylic paint for colour, which she said combines her love of painting with the sculptural aspect of it still in there. For Milne, her sculptural work began with fairies and small figures.
“I like fantasy. There’s too much reality,” she laughed. “I want to escape. I like the escape that you get with fantasy — the way that you can make things look the way you want them to look.”
Patrons can view and purchase her work at her show Once Upon an Indigo Moon, which takes place from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. until Sunday June 19 at the Tulista Gallery.
People can catch Milne doing demonstrations this Saturday and Sunday. For more information on Milne’s work, people can visit her website at indigomoongallery.com