After an unforgettable experience on the East Coast, Shannon Thorpe Frederick is bringing the very first Art Battle to Penticton.
She’s originally from B.C., but spent the past 10 years living in P.E.I. where she competed in the live painting competition for the first time.
“As soon as that countdown happens, the audience counts down with the MC, you just find yourself in the zone. You just tune everything out around you and it’s just a really amazing, intensely awesome experience,” Thorpe Frederick said.
When she wasn’t competing, she was helping out by volunteering.
“Competing is a strong word,” Thorpe Frederick said “Every time I competed I ended up with 10 or 11 new friends, new artist friends. We would help support each other and promote each other and just connect through art.”
Thorpe Frederick is now an event organizer for Art Battle and hopes to start the same kind of connections between artists in Penticton with Art Battle 220 at the Bad Tattoo Brewery on Feb. 12.
The event will start with two rounds featuring 10-12 artists creating an original work with a 20-minute time limit.
“It’s an intense 20 minutes. The audience is encouraged to move in what we call a ‘slow tornado’ fashion around the easels so you can watch each piece evolve,” Thorpe Frederick said.
The winners of each round will then find themselves competing against each other in the final round. As they are watching, the audience will be able to download a voting app on their phones and vote for their favourite piece during the competition. The piece with the most votes moves on to the final round.
You don’t have to be an art aficionado to put in a vote either.
“It’s not just for people who find themselves at galleries and things like that,” Thorpe Frederick said.
Artists are left to their imaginations and a standardized canvas. There are no themes or restrictions to what they can paint.
“It’s completely up to the artist. The only restriction is that they have to use the paint that we provide. They bring their own brushes, tools and instruments,” Thorpe Frederick said.
She added that tools like spray bottles and airbrushes, or anything with mechanical components, won’t be allowed in the competition.
There will also be a silent auction taking place simultaneously, allowing the audience to bid for pieces as they are being created.
“That’s also an exciting element to it because you can have people trying to outbid each other for a piece of art. That adds a fun element,” Thorpe Frederick said.
The artists will receive 50 per cent of the funds raised through the silent auction of their work with the other half of the funds going to support the event.
“There’s no cost for the artists to compete in our competition, so we have a fairly large overhead of supplies and stuff like that. That’s how we keep it free for the artists to compete,” Thorpe Frederick said.
The winner from this competition will qualify for the regional finals with a chance to earn a trip to the national championship in P.E.I. in July.
out to the international competition in P.E.I. in July.
“That’s an exciting goal that artists can look forward to, there’s a pretty big endgame involved with this,” Thorpe Frederick.
The event takes place at 7 p.m. and tickets are $20 with a limited amount of early bird tickets left for $15.
