Fern Helfand has always used the camera to observe and comment on contemporary culture and the surrounding environment. Within this forum she pushes the straight documentary image by combining photographs into believable combinations that she feels can more effectively convey the experience of place and event, than what could be conveyed through a single image.

Music by Veda Hille, Carnage: Reprise, from the album Field Studies

The Muse - Fern Helfand

Throughout his career Steve Mennie has experimented with a variety of media, including working as a freelance editorial illustrator; printmaker; and as a painter in watercolour, acrylic and oil painting.  He has delved within the realms of realism to expressionism to abstraction.  His high realism works tend to document everyday encounters with a cool and detached manner or slant. These images are difficult to read and leave the viewer with an ambiguity as to their intent.  Upon his introduction to painting en plaine aire within the Shuswap area by the artist and friend Herald Nix, Mennie explored the plastic possibilities of the medium itself and was no longer shackled by the representation of form. This new expressionistic approach offered new possibilities whereby he was no longer confined by where paint ends and image begins. For the last 14 years he has been working in the expressive qualities of abstract painting itself and leaving the recognizable image behind.   

Music by Vede Hille:  Carnage: Reprise from the album Field Studies.

The Muse - Steve Mennie

Francis Hatfield was born in the Okanagan to a pioneer family, that emigrated to Canada from the UK. She graduated from the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr) with additional studies at the Ontario College of Art and Okanagan College, in the Fine Arts Program. She has taught at many different places, including Kootenay School of the Arts, Okanagan School of the Arts, and Elliot Lake Summer Art School in Ontario. Frances has delved within various aspects of the arts, such as weaving, painting, and pottery throughout her artistic career.

Music by Veda Hille, "Carnage: Reprise, album "Field Studies"

The Muse CKVS 93.7 FM