Artisan & Gallery

Rem Skolney seeks to reveal the hidden beauty and intrigue of the world around him. “I’ve always had a way of seeing things others often miss. I use photography to share those moments. I love how a simple photo of something everyone passes by every day can bring so much joy and wonder. Is that just another photo of a flower? Or is it a grand stage set in vibrant yellow with our actors—a tiny fly and a tiny spider—poised to deliver the opening libretto of an epic opera?” he says.

Much of Rem’s art presents the vistas and hidden spaces of Denman Island—oceanscapes, landscapes, forests, cafes, the ferry terminal late at night, the iconic Pickles Road bridge, the General Store—often devoid of people. As well, his photos often feature flowers and plants, sometimes in extreme close-up.

Rem also creates altered photography, using editing software and AI. The results range from colourful semi-abstracts to stylized, deliberately pixelated imagery to works that look like traditional paintings.

“When modifying a photo, I’m often trying to create a feeling like from some vivid dream you’d almost forgotten,” he says. “You’re welcome to imagine a deafening silence broken only by the twilight zone theme song blaring out of some rusty old army siren miles off in the distance if that helps.”

Rem’s interest in altered photography started when he was a teenager and discovered he could hack video game graphics. This involves extracting the graphics, altering them, and putting them back into the game. This left him with digital skills and a curiosity about the ways imagery can be revised and enhanced.

See Rem’s work on Denman: Look for Rem’s work in local galleries, at his Farmers Market booth, or the Denman Island Craft Fair.

When mixed-media painter Lisa Geddes looks at the Denman Island forest, she doesn’t just see trees. She sees dynamic patterns, the play of light, and intriguing contrasts between texture, tone, and colour. This aesthetic banquet, not just in the forest but everywhere, is what motivates her as an artist.

“Nature is my greatest inspiration,” she says. “I’m a highly visual person. Wherever I go, I’m constantly looking at design, thinking how I would redesign a space or appreciating when it is perfectly balanced. Mother Nature is the best designer and what I see in nature gives me extraordinary joy.

When Lisa paints, she is looking for a way to distill the beauty and power of the imagery for a viewer to discover. “I ask myself, what is it that grabs me? Is it the pattern, or is it the contrast of light or colour?”

Lisa’s paintings travel the middle ground between abstract and figurative. They often depict something real, like hills in the distance or the branches of a tree, but equally, they are expressions of shape, line, texture, and colour.

Lisa’s goal in her art is always to illustrate her experience of the landscape physically, viscerally, and metaphorically. To do so, she enjoys exploring new media. As well as using traditional artist supplies (canvas, acrylic and watercolour paint, ink, graphite, and charcoal), she incorporates collage, photo transfer, limestone clay, and  found objects such as string, old fabric remnants, kelp, and pinecones.

Lisa has a BFA in studio art from the University of British Columbia and a diploma in graphic design and illustration from Capilano University.

See Lisa Geddes’ work on Denman: At the Denman Craft Shop and via private appointment.

Contact Lisa through her social media sites on instagram and Facebook.

Rhythm is at the essence of Lynn Urban’s visual art—music, pattern, the rhythms of daily life, and the ineffable vibration at the heart of existence.

“Using mark-making, symbolisms, vibrating colour, and repetitive line, my interpretations suggest the rhythms of life and nature, the echo of sound, the roar of the surf, or nature’s stillness. My compositions represent the essential reverberation of the spirit—the life force,” she says.

Lynn’s work straddles the border between abstract and figurative, influenced by Emily Carr, the Group of Seven, and Fauvism. Subject matter ranges from the local—the forest, whales, salmon, and loons of coastal British Columbia—to the international, drawing on impressions from Lynn’s travels around the world.

When travelling in Mexico, Lynn visited museums and excavation sites, spurring an interest in pre-Columbian pottery. When she returned home, she created a series of paintings reflecting the humour in some of the clay figures and pots she saw. The resulting work is brightly coloured and playful.

“I hope people seeing my work can laugh. People don’t need to take art too seriously. We can get humour out of it or simply feel good as we enjoy the composition and colour.”

A classical musician as well as a painter and printmaker, Lynn spends a couple of hours a day playing her violin. She also listens to music while she paints. “Mostly Baroque—everything from Vivaldi to Corelli to Bach to Haydn, and also Spanish and Cuban music,” says Lynn.

“The principles in music are the same as visual art—rhythm, line, colour, form, and repetition,” she says. Both sound and colour are, at their essence, vibrations, she points out.

Contact Lynn: Lynurban@gmail.com

See Lynn’s work on Denman Island: Visit her studio, by appointment only, and keep an eye out for exhibits featuring Lynn’s work.

Magdalene Joly is inspired by the romance of old things, the hidden potential of objects that have been neglected, and the magic of revitalization.

“I love taking old things and breathing new life into them. I love seeing the beauty in them and bringing it forward,” says Magdalene.

Her earrings and necklaces are mostly made from salvaged and upcycled brass, copper, and silver, enhanced with beads and semi-precious stones. Common motifs are disks, half- and crescent moons, dangling chains, circles within circles, teardrops, and triangles.

Each type of metal has its own personality. “I especially love working with copper,” she says. “It’s fairly forgiving and I’m able to find a lot of it. I just love the way that it is alive and develops a patina, and how it behaves differently in different kinds of weather.

Magdalene started making jewelry in 2016 when she got sick with Lyme disease. She’d been farming on Denman, immersed in a back-to-the-land lifestyle. Illness brought that to a halt.

“I couldn’t do hard physical work. I was visiting someone’s shop and got really inspired. I thought, ‘I could do this. I want to make jewelry.’ I started playing around and was hooked right away.”

The scrap pile at her farm provided a wealth of material. She also began haunting thrift stores, the Denman Free store, and recycling dumpsters. Instead of starting with a finished concept and looking for the right material, she likes to wait and see what she finds and take her inspiration from that.

“Sometimes I find antique brass, or silver-plated copper that has different kinds of vintage prints rolled onto it. I really love this look,” she says.

See Magdalene’s work on Denman: At the Denman Island Craft Shop and the Christmas Craft Fair

Marlee Munro is fascinated by the vibrational power of colour. Physics tells us that each colour has its own wavelength, and that everything in existence is made of vibration, but Marlee doesn’t need science to know that colour has power—she feels it.

“What most attracts me to colours is the way they can hum in harmony and in dissonance. I’m always searching for that throb that happens when the colours combine just right,” says Marlee, who graduated with a degree in fine art from North Island College in 2022.

Marlee’s acrylic and watercolour paintings are drenched in intense, vibrant, multi-layered colour. Some are abstract, some portray fantastic and spiritual realms, and some represent actual things, animals, places, and people, including herself.

“My work explores personal experiences, memories, and imaginings,” she says. For instance, her experience of becoming a new mother in 2023 gave rise to a series of paintings that explored the bodily and emotional realities of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood.

“Art is a language for processing our lives, our memories, and our experiences. It offers us a safe place to place all of our brutal honesty and that way it allows us to sense these things and make sense of them,” she says. Expressing that honesty through art creates beauty, she says.

“Being an artist is such a gift. It reminds me to be present and observant, and to notice the beauty in the world.”

Marlee creates in many genres and media, including photography, sculpture, poetry, and music. “I’m willing to pick up and try anything that speaks to me. I really enjoy mixing and switching between mediums, incorporating things from one into the other.”

See Marlee’s work on Denman: Check the Denman Island Craft Shop and island art events.

The originality of Megan Rose’s beaded earrings stems partly from her innate creativity and partly from her determination to respect Indigenous beadwork traditions.

“There’s so much beaded jewelry that comes from Indigenous cultures. I’m not interested in copying that. I’m trying to be non-colonial in how I work, and also I want to create my own unique designs,” says Megan.

Megan cites art deco as a major influence and you will see many elements of this early 20 th Century art movement in her work: sleek, simple lines and ornamentation, geometric patterns, zigzags, lightning bolts, stylized sunrises, and motifs inspired by ancient Greece or Egypt, as well as Asian and African art.

Megan uses delica seed beads from Japan. These beads are prized for their uniformity, which lends itself to beading into patterns and designs. Her jewelry business name, Island Kraftwerk, points to Art Deco’s European roots and its emphasis on exquisite craftsmanship.

Megan brings that love of colour and pattern to her candle business, Curse the Darkness. As with her bead work, she is particular about materials. Beeswax smells gorgeous, burns cleanly and slowly, and is an all-natural product, unlike paraffin, which is a petroleum product, she says.

Megan’s candles come in many shapes—roses, mushrooms, tapers, pillars, hedgehogs, tealights, fir trees, and more. Colours include natural gold, eggplant, deep red, sky blue, and green. They are hand-poured and hand-wicked using 100% cotton wicking.

Lighting a candle transforms your space and your mood, she says. “I have found the quickest way to make myself cozy on dark and stormy nights is to light a candle. Cozy is a state of mind.”

A consummate mistress of side hustles, Megan is also a musician, culinary creator, fabric artist, stand-up comedian, printmaker,  mushroom forager, bicycle mechanic, event organizer, and part-time staff member at Denman Island’s independent bookstore.

See Megan’s work on Denman Island: At the Denman Island Craft Shop, the Farmers Market, and Christmas Craft Fair.

Melissa Winkler found her way to leatherwork because she wanted to make knives, and an unsheathed knife is dangerous.

“I’ve always had my hands in some sort of art or craft. In my 20s, I was fabricating metal for a sculptor and I wanted to learn how to forge knives. A friend suggested I take up leather work so I could offer a full package—knife and sheath,” she says.

Winkler began learning how to work with leather. She founded her company, Dad Hands, in 2015. “I’ve always had scrappy little beat-up hands thanks to my time as a metal fabricator and all-round maker,” she says.

Leather remained a side project for the next five years. This changed in 2020 with the advent of the COVID pandemic. Melissa had just moved from Vancouver to Denman Island when lockdown happened.

“I needed to find a way to work from home and decided to pick leather back up. I found a lot of sculptural techniques transferred over to leather quite well.”

Melissa developed a product line that includes wallets, pouches, purses, hair clips, earrings, key rings, belts, and—yes—knife sheaths, all made of premium vegetable-dyes leathers. “Natural leathers if cared for properly will last generations and if disposed of will actually break down and disappear.”

“I find tooling leather is much akin to carving wood, or sculpting clay/wax. I tend to stray away from traditional western imagery and tool bright, weird, and wonderful images,” she says. Her imagery ranges from colourful flowers and mushrooms to playful aliens to psychedelic swirls.

Where to find her work on Denman: At the Denman Island Farmer’s Market and Denman Island Craft Shop , and Christmas Craft Fair . Keep an eye on Melissa’s Instagram for commission opportunities.

Fire—one of the most powerful transformative forces in all of nature—is at the heart of Nathan Garfat’s work as an artist-blacksmith.

“I mostly work with the forge and the hammer and the anvil,” he says. “And I mostly use reclaimed metal—junk metal. I love taking what is considered to be garbage, getting it ridiculously hot—up to 2000 degrees, hitting it with a hammer, and then when I’m done it’s not garbage anymore.

“It’s hot, it’s loud, and it’s dirty. It’s a lot of destructive elements leading to a creative, productive, and even artistic thing—something beautiful, something that will last forever.”

Nathan creates full-time out of his hand-built workshop in the Denman Island forest. Most of his work is commissioned by private clients who are looking for unique, beautiful metal tools, decorative items, or household wares. His seemingly unlimited range includes utility knives, kitchen knives, hooks, dinner bells, jewelry, ornaments, bowls, spoons, candle holders, magic wands, athames, candle scribes, fireplace tools, garden tools, hinges, latches, hammers, and axes.

Nathan’s artistic process includes creative scavenging—walking the old E&N railway line, picking up old railway spikes that have worked themselves loose, rummaging through scrap metal dumpsters, taking apart abandoned vehicles.

Sometimes, locals let Nathan know about a derelict tractor or car abandoned in the woods. “I head out with my grinder and my saw. There’s some good steel. I like the patina of rust. I like the pitted textures,” he says.

See Nathan’s work on Denman Island: Contact Nathan to arrange a viewing and/or look for him at the Denman Christmas Craft Fair .

Denman Island resident Paola Brodsgaard became known as a consummate curator of beautiful things as the owner of Rusty Rooster, a charming boutique/gift shop on Cumberland’s main drag known for the impeccable quality, style, and ethical product standards of its goods.

Not everyone knows that Paola is also a creator, channeling her sense of style into a variety of artisanal products that reflect her love of colour, texture, and natural materials. When she sold her store in April, 2024, Paola was able to shift her energies toward her personal creative endeavors.

Motivated by the belief that everyday objects can be beautiful and bring joy, Paola designs and sews functional clothing out of natural fabrics such as linen, cotton gauze, wool, and cotton. Her current line includes linen shirts, jumpsuits, dresses, tunics, and headbands.

In the holiday season she makes cute little Christmas gnomes inspired by the Danish tradition of “nisser” (Santa-esque gnomes that are placed around the house for good luck), and linen stockings, advent calendars, napkins, and tea towels.

Crafting, says Paola, is a “little bit of magic you can do with your hands. “I get a tremendous amount of joy and fulfillment out of being creative. It makes me focus, be imaginative, and think outside my box.”

When not crafting, Paola is growing her own food, raising animals, and cooking and baking on the Denman Island acreage she shares with her husband and daughter. Cultivating classic hand skills of sewing, mending, and making feels like a natural extension of this lifestyle.

See Paola’s work on Denman Island: Visit the Denman Island Craft Fair the first weekend in December

Everywhere she look, painter and fabric artist Sara Schouten sees beauty. In response, she creates art.

Sara’s acrylic and watercolour paintings are generally realistic, but subtly stylized, with deeply saturated colours and a folkloric children’s-book feel that captures the magic so many of us experience when we take the time to slow down and look closely at the natural world.

Her favourite subjects include the flora and fauna of Denman Island and the lakes and mountain vistas she encounters on Vancouver island hikes, all enhanced by her vivid imagination.

Lichens emerge from the forest floor like alien beings, a huge rising sun spreads golden rays to the edge of the canvas, a rotting stump hosts new life, tiny succulents hang over a cliff, and imagined fairylands cluster under toadstools.

Sara’s upcycled fabric art—clothing, patches, and wall-hangings—incorporates quilting, crochet, embroidery, and doilies. These are created from old clothing donated by friends or found at the Denman Island Freestore. “I like giving new life to an object that would otherwise be thrown away,” says Sara. She enjoys providing mending and alteration services for Denman Islanders.

Eyes attuned to beauty can see art everywhere, she says. “For instance, I love my rocking chair. It’s interesting, and it’s pretty.” She rejects distinctions between high art and common art, or art and non-art.

“People have all these words like tacky or kitschy, by which they really mean bad, or not classy or elevated enough, but I look at what they’re referring to and often, I love it. Maybe I don’t understand it, but it shows me how someone thought and saw things in a different way and I like looking at it. Just sitting and staring at stuff is kinda great,” says Sara.

Scott Beardsley has enjoyed a 50+ year career that includes high-end large decorative pieces, ceramic murals that can be the centrepiece of a room, high-volume production work, dozens of craft fairs, and many gallery exhibits. Currently, Scott is finding a lot of joy in creating small functional objects that he can sell at affordable prices.

“With the economy these days, not everyone can afford a $300 vase, but people need beautiful, handmade things in their lives. I’ve had people tell me how much their $25 dollar mug means to them, how they love the feel of it in their hands and how it calms them when they’re stressed. Hearing these comments makes me feel I’m fullfilling my function as a potter.”

Scott’s work is inspired by natural beauty of Denman Island. His colour palette is a love letter to the infinitely varied shades of greens and earth tones in the coastal rainforest—golds, rich browns, and velvety black. The leaf patterns—maple, hazelnut, wild rose, bracken fern, lemon balm—that adorn much of his work come from the land he lives on and the forest he walks through regularly to find material. The natural environment is literally inscribed on his pottery via imprints of the delicate vein patterns on the backs of the leaves.

“From all these years living on the west coast, that landscape has surely influenced what I make,” says Scott. “Other major influences are Asian pots, especially from Japan, Korea, and China. “I’m always surprised at how versatile the clay medium is and how even after all these years it can still give me so much joy while also keeping me humble.”

Studio: 4920a Lacon Road, Denman Island, open 10:00 – 5:00 daily