Will Millar will be here playing and sing some tunes from his former Irish Rover days. Will Millar, as the former leader of The Irish Rovers has now returned to his first creative love of painting. In this exhibition he is a voyager into the Ireland of his youth, portraying the country in the 1950's, before glass supermarkets and traffic jams clogged up small villages.
This exhibition opens just in time for Halloween, the origins of which come from Ireland over 2000 years ago. The Samhain Festival took place on the night of October 31. The Celts, who occupied the land which is now called Ireland, celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth. Samhain is an old celtic word pronounce "Sow in".
To commemorate the event, Druids built huge sacred bonfires, where the people gathered to burn crops and animals as sacrifices to the Celtic deities. During the celebration, the Celts wore costumes, typically consisting of animal heads and skins, and attempted to tell each other's fortunes.
When the celebration was over, they re-lit their hearth fires, which they had extinguished earlier that evening, from the sacred bonfire to help protect them during the coming winter.

Calgary based artist Shelley McMillan exhibits two very different bodies of work.  For Shelley, each discipline is integral to the other.  Her abstract works give her freedom to explore and play with various mediums, colours, shapes and texture, which in turn help her form and compose her expressive landscapes.

One Artist – Two Visions
Imagination and Reality
My newest works over the past year reflect the desire to create freely, and the need to show reality. My landscapes have always represented the beauty that I see around me. My abstractions represent how I imagine and perceive things; differently, distorted, mildly disturbing, often unrecognizable as anything in particular.
The assemblages reflect perfectly my desire to show off what I find beautiful. Redefining and reshaping human and natural creations that are on their way to destruction. Everything comes and goes. Nothing remains as it was, and the breakdown is what interests me - animal bones, rocks, driftwood, man-made items that are no longer useful for their original purpose or design. Beauty is in every stage of the natural march toward ashes and dust.

  

Shelley McMillan

Meet the artists and catalogue signing on March 2^nd 2017, 5:30 – 8:30 pm