Queens Coast Art Tour dares to be different
Scot Slessor at his stained glass studio SAS Glass, just off Main Street in Liverpool. Slessor is one of the organizers of the Queens Coast Art Tour on June 22 and 23. (Rick Conrad)
Liverpool stained glass artist Scot Slessor wants the Queens Coast Art Tour to be memorable.
But he also wants the map for the tour to be just as unforgettable, and useful. Last year, he recruited Region of Queens Mayor Darlene Norman to help him with a video explaining how to make a paper airplane out of the map.
Obviously making a paper airplane isn’t the map’s most important function. In fact, Slessor wants people to unfold it to reveal the many Queens County artisans listed there and pay them a visit during the Queens Coast Art Tour.
The map plots all participating artisans and businesses, with QR codes that link to their websites or social media accounts.
Slessor owns SAS Glass in downtown Liverpool. He and some other local artisans got together last year to form the Queens County Arts and Crafts Society, taking over from the Queens Arts Council.
One of their first projects was to create an art map and studio tour. That happened last October, and it included almost 25 artisans from Liverpool to Western Head to Port Medway.
This year, it’s expanded to more than 40 artists, shops and popups all over Queens County. And there will be two chances to participate, in June and October.
The first one is coming up on June 22 and 23. The tour runs 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day.
Slessor says it’s all about promoting Queens County as an arts destination, and about artisans opening up their studios or demonstrating their craft to local residents and visitors.
“I’ve been on a ton of these studio tours,” Slessor said in a recent interview.
“What I’ve told everybody, you’re just not another sale. Just don’t put stuff on a table. If you’re painting, paint. I’m glass, I’ll be doing something with glass those days. People can come in, I can show them what I do, what the materials are, how I play with them. That has to be there, because people do find that interesting. … We need to be different. Everybody does craft sales up and down the shore. So what’s the difference? I think the difference should be come on down, we’re throwing some pottery, we’re making some jewelry, you can see what we’re doing.”
Slessor says last October’s art tour was a success for many of the artists, some of whom were surprised by how many people dropped by to see them in action.
“I had 30 people each day in here. All I did was gab all day to people. And then I talked to other people who never really opened their studio and they said, ‘I can’t believe all these people showed up to my studio.’ So, it was kind of cool.
“You might show one person your studio and have a cup of coffee, but when you have 20 people rolling through in a day, it is kind of neat.”
In addition to visiting artisans at their studios or work spaces, art lovers can also meet them at three popup locations: the Astor Theatre, White Point Beach Resort and Coastal Queens Place in Port Mouton.
“Some artists are very quiet and unassuming. And suddenly you find there’s a guy on the street here who’s a fantastic portrait painter. You didn’t even know he was there. And locally, I think it’s important. Last October, when we did this, a lot of folks who came around were local.
“One of the wider goals of something like this is you feel like you have a sense of community and that you’re not working totally in isolation. Doing art can be a very isolating thing. To let them know that they have a community to be part of.”
Aside from the obvious goal of giving artisans more chances to sell their work, another objective of the tour is to bring art lovers to the area from all over the province and beyond.
“In the perfect world, I’d love to see artisans selling stuff and making some money,” Slessor says.
“I think if we bring people to the county, whether they buy from one of us or just spend some time in a restaurant or going to the Astor or doing whatever, that’s all positive. So we (hope to) increase the number of people coming into the county.”
Slessor says the Queens County Arts and Crafts Society has also applied for provincial funding to help them work on their online marketing and promotion.
And he says he’d like to see international artists come to Liverpool for four-week residencies.
The former diplomat has reached out to some of his contacts overseas.
“It would be great to have, I don’t know, a Taiwanese artist here for four or five weeks. They’d be at the Astor. We would introduce them to other artisans. It would be fun and informative and something totally different.”
People can pick up a Queens Coast art tour map in Liverpool at the Visitor Information Centre, the Astor Theatre, Main and Mersey coffee bar, Shore Thing Studio and Emporium or at SAS Glass just across from the Astor.
You can also find the map online here: https://sasglass.ca/resources/map6.jpg or follow Queens Coast Art Tour on Facebook.
Email: rickconradqccr@gmail.com
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