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Big Country Printers remembers Alida Schotel with show at Quesnel Art Gallery

The show opens on Friday, April 5 at 7 p.m.
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From left: Fred Paulson, holding a digital rendering by Ashlyn Schmautz, Gilbert Schotel, holding a painting of Alida by Tuesday Rudolph, and Ross Mitchell, holding a photograph by Floyd Schotel. Heather Norman photo

The Big Country Printers Group of Artists is putting on a mixed media memorial art show in honour of Alida Schotel.

The group is made up of the staff at Big Country Printers and the Schotel family, and the show will include work by Gilbert and Mellissa Schotel, Gary Schotel, Floyd and Soby Schotel, Fred Paulson, Ross Mitchell and Ashlyn Schmautz. The show will also feature a painting of Alida by local artist Tuesday Rudolph.

Everyone involved in the show, except Rudolph, is either a member of the Schotel family or an employee of Big Country Printers — and by extension, also family.

Gilbert came up with the idea to put on a show with the group during the summer, but it wasn’t until his mother died in a sudden accident that the show began to take shape.

“It was like, well, this kind of brings us together; we can do something in honour of her. And then we can express some of our art in terms of how she viewed life and our different takes from it, so that was our thought and that’s where we went with [the show].”

The show will feature a variety of mediums, from photography to acrylic, watercolour and gouache paintings to drawings to digital art renderings.

“We all see the world around us a little differently, and each of us is just showing what we see in the world,” says Gilbert.

The show may feature as many as 60 to 80 pieces — or as many as they can fit into the gallery.

“[Alida] would see joy and beauty in everything,” says Gilbert, adding that means something different to each of them. “It means the joy that she has seen in travelling, that she has seen around the world; whether it’s what she’d seen in nature, or what she’d seen in people. So we all kind of have a different take on that.”

Gilbert says he hopes people who attend the show come away better able to see the beauty in the mundane. “How you can see the world and take joy from that.”

In Memory of Alida opens on Friday, April 5 from 7-9 p.m. The show runs until April 27.