Studio Inside: Artist Giuseppe Albi sees his studio as a place of joy

Posted 05/04/2013 by Giuseppe Albi

By Janice Ryan, Edmonton Journal April 5, 2013

Abstract artist Giuseppe Albi in his studio on March 13, 2013 in Edmonton Photograph by: Greg Southam, Edmonton Journal

EDMONTON – For artist Giuseppe Albi, having a studio is a way of life. In fact, Albi has had a place to explore and experiment, to contemplate and reflect, for 44 of his 66 years.

Born in Grimaldi, Italy, Albi came to Edmonton as a young boy. He loved to draw and went on to study at the Alberta College of Art in Calgary (1966-68) and Quebec’s L’Ecole des Beaux Arts (1968-69).

Albi secured his first studio — it doubled as his living space — in a commercial building in Montreal in 1969. The following year he moved to London, England, where a wee bed-sit served as a studio and his oil paintings were tucked beneath the bed.

Six months later Albi relocated to Amsterdam. This time his studio, tucked inside a gable-roofed building, was separate from his living space down the hall.

The cramped reality of a four-by-five-foot studio didn’t daunt his artistic process or output. He landed his first solo exhibition that year.

A year-and-a-half later, Albi moved back to London and celebrated a second solo show in Edinburgh, Scotland.

In 1974, he returned to Edmonton and rented a studio on Rice Howard Way. There were no windows — not ideal for an artist — but it was a place to make art.

He eventually moved to a commercial building on the south side, the drawback here being low ceilings. Albi remembers breaking light bulbs as he turned his eight-foot paintings so the freshly applied paint could drip and run around the canvas.

Then, there was the west-end warehouse. The studio flooded during the devastating Black Friday tornado in 1987.

Moving a studio is disruptive, labour-intensive, time-consuming and expensive but an inevitable reality for artists as buildings are sold, repurposed or demolished.

In 2007, Albi found the perfect studio on 109th Street and 107th Avenue, a space he describes as his most “sophisticated,” referring to the glorious afternoon light that pours in through a bank of windows along a 40-foot wall.

The space is truly an artist’s dream come true: spacious enough to allow for large-scale work; oodles of natural light; quiet; and centrally located. Oh, and high ceilings.

Though economic struggles can be an artist’s reality, Albi made having a studio a priority.

“I’d budget and make it work,” says Albi. “There were times when basically, I would just barely make it, but I would make sure I covered all of my studio expenses.”

Boundless drive and passion intrigue me. What keeps that ember burning?

“Very early on I felt that making art was my life’s work, so it had to be done,” Albi says.

“And I very much believe that you are only going to be here once, certainly in this consciousness, and I really wanted to take advantage of that opportunity and to make art. I mean, if I didn’t make it, it would be a missed day, so it’s important that I worked and that I worked regularly. I believe that the only non-renewable resource in life is time, and once it is spent, it is spent.”

Alongside his studio practice, Albi had a successful career as a consultant, producer and project developer for organizations such as Events Edmonton, Taste of Edmonton and The Works Art and Design Festival. Throughout the years, his commitment to scheduled studio time was staunch — weekdays 7 to 9 a.m. and weekends. No nights?

“I find that you need to get away from your work, you can’t be around it all the time,” he says. “I don’t even have many paintings at home because you have to empty yourself of it.

“Part of the process of making abstract art is that every time you finish a painting, you almost have to forget how to paint. To me, there has to be a sense of discovery in the new work.”

Albi’s roots are in action painting or abstract expressionism, rich in colour and mark making.

Since retiring last August, he’s in the studio six mornings a week, working on up to seven paintings.

“This studio is full of joy for me. When I come in and close the door, I completely separate myself from the world,” he says. “I don’t paint to music. My studio is very much a place of quiet and meditation and prayer for me.”

The 1,100-square-foot area is divided into three rooms: a gallery at the entrance; an office and clean area for stretching canvas; and a great room filled with work tables, a long bench stacked with brushes, palette knives, trowels and a rainbow of paints and gels; and storage racks for pre-stretched canvases. A separate 300-square-foot storage room holds the finished work.

Albi describes his studio as an “extension” of himself. A carpenter’s son, he handmade everything to be ergonomic, functional and space efficient. Tables for example, are on wheels.

Paintings hang on a chain system suspended from the T-bars in the ceiling. Heights can be adjusted and the walls are hole-free. Best of all, the work space serves as a gallery for both finished and in-progress work.

The unique mechanical table was custom-made by an industrial designer. It moves up, down and sideways and tilts in all directions.

This studio is very much customized to meet his needs, right down to his one-of-a-kind paints created by Golden.

Albi’s abstracts were part of the 2002 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art in Calgary and Edmonton and most recently, the Art Gallery of Alberta’s “7 Years in the City, Art From the AGA Collection.”

His paintings, found in public and private collections worldwide, can be viewed locally at Peter Robertson Gallery.

Albi is quick to share, “I feel really blessed to be doing what I want to do. I am living a dream.”

Visit giuseppealbi.ca for more information.

Abstract artist Giuseppe Albi works in his studio on March 13, 2013 in Edmonton. Photograph by: Greg Southam, Edmonton Journal

More On Mainstream Modernist Painting and The New New

Posted 30/03/2013 by Giuseppe Albi

There are already a distinguished group of art professionals who agree that the New New are a distinct and exciting, new movement. The dealer, André Emmerich, the collector Lewis Cabot, and the art historian, William Agee, are three examples. Others include the American critics Donald Kuspit, David Carrier, Arelene Raven; the Canadian critics Ken Carpenter, the Belgian critic Marcel Paquet, as well the museum directors and curators here and abroad who have selected the New New group for exhibition. Three collectors have built large collections of their work.

There are good painters who have not yet been exhibited with the New New but whose work relates to theirs in sensibility, if not yet in focus and consistency: American painters, Gorden Terry and David Reed; the Canadian painters Neil Marshall, Clay Ellis, Bill Kort, and Giuseppe Albi, as well as the Irish painter Declan O’Mahoney. All have been influenced by New New.

There are pictures by Walter Darby Bannard and Dan Christensen, which would also look at home in a New New exhibition. So would Jules Olitski’s paintings done on mirrored plexi, which he did shortly after visiting Lucy Baker’s studio in 1986. Olitski’s recent style follows New New in many respects while retaining his own voice, tonalities, and color. Ann Walsh’s new painted reliefs also have a New New flair about them.

The New New are the most vital and audacious members of a much larger group which might be called the third generation or wave of Color Field painters. All came along since the 70’s. The centers for this work are New York, Syracuse, Toronto, Edmonton, Paris and London. I showed a group of these painters back in 1980, in a exhibition at the André Emmerich Gallery, called “The New Generation”. Aside from the New New, this group has not yet equalled or gone beyond their mentors – Olitski, Noland and Poons – in any fundamental way. Nonetheless, many of them produce, or have produced, some wonderful paintings: Darryl Hughto, Susan Roth, James Walsh, Peter Bradley, Robert Scott, James Hendricks, Sandi Sloan, John Hoyland, John MacLean, John Griefen, Pat Lipsky, Jill Nathenson, Larry Zox, Molly Morris, Stephen Achimore, Scott Bennet, Mark Raush, Olivier Dubre, Jean Miotte, Lauren Olitski, Ronnie Landfield, Sheila Gehrling, Harold Feist, Frank Bowling, Francine Tint, Terry Keller, Mitch Smith, Doug Haynes, Jeremy Down, Kikuo Saito, Jiri Malik, Randi Bloom, Michael Williams, Paula DeLuccia and Joseph Marioni. There are doubtless many others who I am unaware of or am leaving out. Taken together with the New New, this is a very large group. The official New York art world doesn’t yet register it at all, yet it must be called painting’s Modernist Mainsteam.

Very often, Modernism can be described as the creative use of new technologies. One only has to think of Modern Architecture, Modern Sculpture or Modern Music. As regards to painting, the heavier oils (like poppy seed oil), and tube pigments, which came into use in the 19th century, were essential for the Impressionists and Post Impressionists painters. Crucial to the second generation of Color Field painters (Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Helen Frankenthaler, Friedel Dzubas, Jack Bush and others) was acrylic, water based, plastic paint which became commercially available in the late fifties. Pollock and others already had pushed painting beyond the limits of oil paint and had turned to industrial paints, Duco enamels and aluminum paint, to get greater fluidity and more optical effects. The fragility of his pictures today, and those of many members of his generation, is testimony to a frustration with the limits of the oil medium and a search for alternatives. Most of the Color Field painters stained thinned paint into untreated canvas. They did this to neutralize texture and so present pure, optical color as the primary bearer feeling. But oil paint is difficult to thin down, and no matter how thin, it eventually attacks the canvas fibers if stained directly into them. This is why, since the beginning of oil painting in the 16th century, painters prepared the surface of their canvas with a “sizing”, usually of rabbit skin glue, before beginning to paint. Water based acrylic paint automatically solved this problem while, simultaneously, offering a fluid friendly, quick drying medium with an entirely new palette of brilliant colors. It seemed made to order for the Color Field painters. And indeed, the leading manufacturer of the new acrylics, Leonard Bocour and his chemist Sam Golden, worked closely with the painters, beginning with Morris Louis, to develop the new medium.

The New New painters have continued this creative dialogue with the paint chemist, Sam Golden (who died in 1997) and his son Mark. The development of acrylic paint and avant garde painting continue to go hand and hand. The most important invention in the eighties was a completely clarified gel, a thickening and extending agent. This made acrylics a full bodied medium, like oils, but capable of thicker imposto, brighter color and clearer transparency. Gel can also act as a kind of glue or sealer permitting painters to fold additives like plastic foam into the body of their pictures. This has made possible the sculpture punch of the New New. And rather than using acrylics as a more convenient way to achieve effects possible in oils, the New New painters features acrylics’ distinctly plastic look and feel. Also they and other painters have played an essential role in the creation of many new types of paint: metallic paint (gold, silver, copper, aluminum), glitter paint, hologram paint, pearlescent paint, cement like (but lightweight) pumice paint, iridescent, “interference” paint, multi-layered “panspectra” paint, protective varnish for fluorescent paint and more. Although, dramatically increasing painting’s range of effects, many of these are wholly unreproducible. The dazzling newness of the New New is badly compromised in photographs and reproductions.

Of course, none of the above should be taken to mean that oil, enamel, fresco, tempera, or any other painting medium is outdated. But it does mean that acrylics and Pollock-type painting seem uniquely compatible. Most members of Pollock’s own generation quickly switched to acrylics when they became available. This is the biggest change in the medium of painting since the 16th century.

All this demonstrates how very misleading the notion of “Postmodernism” is. Stimulated by new technology, artists create new mediums and revolutionize traditional ones. This process is ongoing and will not stop anytime soon. The worlds most visible architect, Frank Gehry, is a Modernist in this sense and so are our most celebrated sculptors: Richard Serra and Frank Stella. Color Field and New New are not yet celebrated, but they too are Modernist in the above sense, and have been all along.

Source: Moffett’s Artletter 2.0

Taste-maker switching canvases – Organizer of city food fest set to retire, focus on art full time

Posted 27/07/2012 by Giuseppe Albi

Friday, July 27, 2012

After almost a decade of chocolate-covered strawberries, spanakopita, butter chicken and spring rolls, Giuseppe Albi is leaving the world of food to focus on art.

Albi, 65, will retire at the end of August as general manager of Events Edmonton, which produces A Taste of Edmonton, as well as the new Metropolis International Winter Festival.

But he won’t stop working. He plans to devote himself full time to his long career as an abstract painter, which he has been practising early in the morning before going to his manager’s job.

“Most artists, it’s very difficult to make a living as an artist, so you have to find something else. Fortunately for me, I was drawn into the events planning business. I had a knack for it.”

Albi has been putting on Taste since 2004, but was first hired as a contractor in 1976 by the Edmonton Exhibition Association (now Northlands) to stage an arts, crafts and culinary fair.

He eventually began working for the Edmonton Klondike Days Association, renamed Events Edmonton in 2006, running shows related to the summer fair outside the exhibition grounds such as the Sunday Promenade.

Taste started in 1985 as a two-day event on a plaza overlooking the river valley where the Shaw Conference Centre’s Hall D now stands.

It moved to Churchill Square and was extended to five days in 1993.

It now lasts 10 days around Capital Ex. This year there are booths from 40 restaurants and as many as five food trucks in what Albi compares to a giant outdoor food court.

“We want to showcase the variety of food that’s found in the city.

“You can go outside, have music, and it’s a place to group and socialize.”

The idea of eating al fresco is fairly new in a city that’s cold for much of the year – he says the first restaurant patio opened in Edmonton less than 35 years ago.

Albi estimates producing Taste costs $500,000 to $1 million annually, including $90,000 for music alone.

Last Sunday was the busiest he has ever seen it, although Events Edmonton doesn’t keep attendance figures.

The non-profit group doesn’t even count the thousands of tickets handed over for meals, instead weighing what each booth operator collects, after ensuring the paper isn’t wet and there isn’t any garbage in the submission.

One of Albi’s biggest challenges was shifting Taste to a park at Jasper Avenue and 102nd Street while Churchill Square was being reconstructed in 2004.

“We had to cut the (number of) restaurants in half. We had a small green space, but we made it work.”

The winter festival started its inaugural run last New Year’s Eve in four heated pavilions, each designed by a local architect using scaffolding shrinkwrapped in white plastic and lit at night.

The buildings showed off the latest cold-weather construction technology, but there were complaints not enough was happening inside.

Albi admits there were times during the seven-week run when they didn’t have a lot of programming.

While it’s hard to shorten the festival because it takes weeks to construct and dismantle the site, he suggests using fewer structures and reducing heating costs by changing the flooring to leave less space underneath.

The Events Edmonton board is reviewing the future of the festival, and it’s uncertain if it will be staged next year, he says.

However, new festivals often have issues to resolve, he says.

“You have to develop a customer base and develop the programming, and that takes patience,” Albi says. “My whole vision was it was tied to the construction industry. There are so many opportunities, but it needs a chance to evolve.”

He plans to focus on painting in preparation for a February show at the Peter Robertson Gallery, although he might continue taking on event planning projects as a consultant.

His interest in the field was reaffirmed last weekend when he was introduced to the mayor of Harbin, Edmonton’s sister city in China, during a tour of Taste with local officials.

“He shook my hand and said, ‘You make a lot of people happy.’ That’s my legacy,” Albi says.

“Someone like the mayor of Harbin saying, ‘You make a lot of people happy,’ that’s what makes it all worthwhile.”

gkent@edmontonjournal.com

Source: Edmonton Journal 2012

Events manager plans to follow his taste for art

Posted 25/07/2012 by Giuseppe Albi

Giuseppe Albi Photograph by: Greg Southam , Edmonton Journal

EDMONTON – After almost a decade of chocolate-covered strawberries, spanakopita, butter chicken and spring rolls, Giuseppe Albi is leaving the world of food to focus on art.

Albi, 65, will retire at the end of August as general manager of Events Edmonton, which produces A Taste of Edmonton as well as the new Metropolis International Winter Festival.

But he won’t stop working. He plans to devote himself full-time to his long career as an abstract painter, which he has been practising early in the morning before going to his manager’s job.

“Most artists, it’s very difficult to make a living as an artist, so you have to find something else. Fortunately for me, I was drawn into the events planning business. I had a knack for it.”

Albi has been putting on Taste since 2004, but was first hired as a contractor in 1976 by the Edmonton Exhibition Association (now Northlands) to stage an arts, crafts and culinary fair.

He eventually began working for the Edmonton Klondike Days Association, renamed Events Edmonton in 2006, running shows related to the summer fair outside the exhibition grounds such as the Sunday Promenade.

Taste started in 1985 as a two-day event on a plaza overlooking the river valley where the Shaw Conference Centre’s Hall D now stands. It moved to Churchill Square and was extended to five days in 1993.

It now lasts 10 days around Capital Ex. This year there are booths from 40 restaurants and up to five food trucks in what Albi compares to a giant outdoor food court.

“We want to showcase the variety of food that’s found in the city … You can go outside, have music, and it’s a place to group and socialize.”

The idea of eating al fresco is fairly new in a city that’s cold for much of the year — he says the first restaurant patio opened in Edmonton less than 35 years ago.

Albi estimates producing Taste costs $500,000 to $1 million annually, including $90,000 for music alone.

Last Sunday was the busiest he has ever seen it, although Events Edmonton doesn’t keep attendance figures.

The non-profit group doesn’t even count the thousands of tickets handed over for meals, instead weighing what each booth operator collects after ensuring the paper isn’t wet and there isn’t any garbage in the submission.

One of Albi’s biggest challenges was shifting Taste to a park at Jasper Avenue and 102nd Street while Churchill Square was being reconstructed in 2004.

“We had to cut the (number of) restaurants in half, we had a small green space, but we made it work.”

The winter festival started its inaugural run last New Year’s Eve in four heated pavilions, each designed by a local architect using scaffolding shrink-wrapped in white plastic and lit at night.

The buildings showed off the latest cold-weather construction technology, but there were complaints not enough was happening inside.

Albi admits there were times during the seven-week run when they didn’t have a lot of programming.

While it’s hard to shorten the festival because it takes weeks to construct and dismantle the site, he suggests using fewer structures and reducing heating costs by changing the flooring to leave less space underneath.

The Events Edmonton board is reviewing the future of the festival, and it’s uncertain whether it will be staged next year, he says.

However, new festivals often have issues to resolve, he says.

“You have to develop a customer base and develop the programming, and that takes patience,” Albi says. “My whole vision was it was tied to the construction industry … There are so many opportunities, but it needs a chance to evolve.”

He plans to focus on painting in preparation for a February show at the Peter Robertson Gallery, although he might continue taking on event planning projects as a consultant.

His interest in the field was reaffirmed last weekend when he was introduced to the mayor of Harbin, Edmonton’s sister city in China, during a tour of Taste with local officials.

“He shook my hand and said ‘You make a lot of people happy.’ That’s my legacy,” Albi says.

“Someone like the mayor of Harbin saying ‘You make a lot of people happy,’ that’s what makes it all worthwhile.”

gkent@edmontonjournal.com

Taste of Edmonton near flawless

Posted 25/07/2012 by Giuseppe Albi

By Graham Hicks ,Edmonton Sun

FIRST POSTED: WEDNESDAY, JULY 25, 2012 12:00 AM MDT | UPDATED: TUESDAY, JULY 24, 2012 09:21 AM MDT

It usually takes a while to get things perfect.
But did you have to wait until the very end, Giuseppe Albi?
Giuseppe is the long-time producer of A Taste of Edmonton. The event started under his watch as general manager of the not-for-profit Events Edmonton.
After the 2012 Taste of Edmonton, Giuseppe is retiring. He’ll focus on his other career, as a renowned abstract painter.
This Taste of Edmonton is his best.
Taste of Edmonton is the city’s premier food fest. Forty-two restaurants booths line Churchill Square and are open from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day until Saturday. Each sells two food items, usually at $4 to $5 each.
Taste of Edmonton is now near-flawless. The food choices are outstanding, the balance between yummy grease-o-rama and healthier dishes has been found. There’s also balance in the variety of restaurant booths. All tastes are fulfilled.
The lay-out creates festivity. It’s crowded enough at peak periods to generate excitement, but still breathable. Meanwhile, oasises of sit ‘n’ snack spaces can be found throughout the square and its perimeters.
The growing food truck scene is acknowledged. Five food trucks off the northeast corner play by the same rules as the booths.
The admission-free beer garden in the middle of Churchill Square has great live entertainment, with huge beverage selection at decent prices in the Taste of Beer and Taste of Spirits tents.
On the square’s north edge is the more tranquil, cafe -style Taste of Wine tent, again with excellent choice at reasonable prices.
It’s all highly civilized.
The food! The food!
Decisions are difficult — old favourites, new attractions, the sinfully delicious, the healthy, the barbecue, the classics — that interesting dish you saw just go by, which booth line-up is the shortest…
Just plunge in, buy your tickets, and eat away. Here’s what we tried.
The weird: deep-fried pickles (pickle slices doused in bar-food batter and deep-fried) at The Canadian Brewhouse booth. Quite the combo of hot, sour and crispy… and unusual!
The classic: Palace Banquets has been at Taste of Edmonton forever. This year they have three hot, steaming, fresh big scallops on a stick, wrapped in bacon that oozes aroma and is packed with artery-clogging calories. But so good!
Equally off the tasty dial from the Palace is a delicious light, creamy chocolate dulce cake dessert.
Another sweet is Pazzo Pazzo’s authentic tiramisu, a last indulgence before this feast must be followed by temporary famine.
The healthy AND delicious! Caffe Sorrentino’s chickpea salad cleanses the palate of all that grease. Tzin’s panzanella salad — chopped tomato with crouton-sized soft bread — is another health-conscious winner.
The delightfully new: The calamari at La Pasta Trattoria is light, fresh, plentiful, coated in a whisper of flour and perfectly paired with a scrumptious lemon garlic aoli sauce.
The meaty new: IRIE Foods on Whyte is offering slow-cooked, falling-off-the-bone, flavour-saturated Caribbean jerk chicken with rice in a delicious meaty sauce. The spice is moderated to Canadian tolerance levels, but add the stand-by Calypso sauce and one’s mouth is instantly, pleasingly, on fire! Irie!
Sausage delights: Bistro Praha’s Hungarian sausage on hot garlic bread with saurkraut is garlic heaven. Back at Tzin, co-owner Kelsey Danyluk, with Irvings Farm Fresh meat processers, has created a new, moist-style chorizo sausage. It is out-of-this-world delicious, braised in wine and served with Spanish bean salad.
There’s been grumbling about prices. Most Taste of Edmonton dishes cost four to five tickets at $1 each. Sorry, but the cost of transforming Churchill Square into a foodfest, complete with free entertainment, eats up a big chunk of that ticket price, and the restaurants won’t be long in business if prices are below costs. The value for money spent is most reasonable.
Eat on! A Taste of Edmonton runs through Saturday evening.

Source: HicksBiz Blog 2012

Edmonton Urban Design Awards 2011 Winners

Posted 29/01/2011 by Giuseppe Albi

Award of Merit

Metropolis: Edmonton International Winter Festival

Project Owner: Events Edmonton; Giuseppe Albi

Designer: Giuseppe Albi

Artists: Giuseppe Albi and Tyler Tue

Project Description: Since the introduction of Muk Luk Mardi Gras in 1967, there had been a desire to stage a festival during the colder months of the Edmonton Capital Region. Events Edmonton responded with METROPOLIS to create an event to be staged on Winston Churchill Square and the surrounding streets. Artists from the USA and Canada were invited by Events Edmonton to design the pavilions.

The event will consist of nine free-standing, heated temporary structures made from Aluma Systems construction scaffolding covered with white shrink wrap and design to offer shelter in normal Edmonton winter conditions. The upper interior spaces of the structural forms featured artistic, multi-media light and sound shows utilizing 21st century new media.

Source: Edmonton Journal 2011

New paint helped artist rediscover joy of canvas

Posted 30/04/2009 by Giuseppe Albi

Painter Giuseppe Albi has always loved to experiment with materials and play with artistic practices as he creates his large-scale abstract works.
Last fall, when Jim Hayes, technical director at Golden Artist Colours, dropped off 13 litres of a new paint just out of the laboratory to sample, the Edmonton artist was in painter-nerd seventh heaven.
Realizing that most painters would work on canvas with this new paint, Albi temporarily stopped painting on the white plastic sheets he’d been using as a substrate for several years. To his amazement, he rediscovered his deep love for canvas-based painting and old-school abstract expressionist image-making.
“I also discovered that I could apply many of the techniques I’d developed working on the plastic substrate to works I was painting on canvas,” says Albi. “I was pouring paint more as well as moving it around with the trowel, working more with smooth flat surfaces and had a different attitude towards the edge of the work. Also, work on canvas dries so much faster, which is important for me because I don’t always have that much time to paint.”
Shifting back to a more tried-and-true Golden paint line, Albi decided to paint a series of work on stretched canvas. Called “Colours,” this body of work is on display at the Peter Robertson Gallery.
Q: How important are innovations in paint, pigments and materials to the painters?
A: In every period of painting history, from the cave painters experimenting with different natural pigments to the move from fresco painting to board and canvas, technology has always been very much a part of making art. In fact, art is based on the materials at use at any given time. Acrylic paints and visible brush strokes are very much a part of painting now in a way they weren’t in the past. …
Q: How important is experimentation to your artmaking?
A: It’s very, very important. For me, it’s all about exploring different kinds of combinations, different ways of moving paint around and different compositions. This is about blending technologies and jumping out of the box. If you think about it, there isn’t that long of a tradition for abstract expressionist painting, so you have to work at finding new things to do, new vocabularies, all the while staying true to that tradition. It’s about trying to find ways to expand the vocabulary of colour. …
Q: I really like the way this “travel” pigment looks so different up close and farther away. It’s like looking at two different paintings.
A: It’s a very important function of this kind of paint. I like the fact that you have both a strong distant and closeup visual appeal. It should break down to one or the other.

Source: Gilbert Bouchard, The Edmonton Journal 2009

Celebration of Italian-Canadian life unveiled

Posted 30/04/2007 by Giuseppe Albi

Column tells a story for future generations about the pioneers who brought a slice of Italy to Alberta

EDMONTON – Carlo Amodio spent many sleepless nights during the last two years as he co-ordinated the building of a monument to honour the work and lives of Italian immigrants in Alberta in the last 100 years.

“When we got the 7,000-pound granite column in our yard, we were really, really concerned on just how we were going to lift it and move it. But we got some great help from the Italian community. It was just phenomenal cooperation,” said Amodio, president of the National Congress of Italian-Canadians, Edmonton District.

From the craftsmen who shaped the column of Quebec granite, to those families in Alberta’s Italian community who donated artifacts to be bronzed and attached at its base, the monument is a testament to the pride, passion and culture of Italian people, Amodio said.

“If this granite could speak, it would say: ‘It is our pride to share,’ ” Amodio said at Saturday’s unveiling.

The three-metre-tall monument, which stands on the northwest corner of the Alberta legislature grounds, was designed by Edmonton artist Giuseppe Albi, whose work was selected out of 21 entries in a national competition.

“May this monument be a perpetual symbol for those who came to this land, and for those will come in the future and contribute to the prosperity of the province of Alberta and the Italian community,” said Amodio, who immigrated to Canada in the 1960s and has been active in his community for the last 30 years.

“I look at this monument today and I must compliment the beauty of its design and the quality of craftsmanship of all those who helped to build it,” he said.

“For the last two years, there have been a number of people who have followed all the aspects of this project, and I can say without hesitation that we are full of pride for this accomplishment.”

Albi said he wanted to design a multimedia piece with the help of Alberta’s Italian community.

“Italians have always talked with their hearts, with their minds,” Albi said,

explaining the inspiration behind his design. “They always put their hearts and souls into everything they do so I really wanted somehow, some way to bring this forward.”

He chose a granite column because in Italy, columns with carvings have been used to tell stories of events in time.

At the suggestion of his wife, Albi asked the Italian community for artifacts representing their culture and some of the occupations of their ancestors when they arrived in Alberta.

These he had bronzed and attached around the column’s base. Some of the artifacts include a soccer ball, a pick axe, a bottle of wine, a wood planer, a shoemaker’s tools, a merchant’s scoop and a violin.

Gabriele Sardo, Italy’s ambassador to Canada, was among the invited dignitaries.

Sardo said a monument is a reminder, not for those who are already here, “but for those who will come next. I would like future generations passing by this monument to see the memories that have been passed on.”

floyie@thejournal.canwest.com