A fresh coat of paint for Mountain Grove

Jonas Bonnetta | Nov 11, 2015

New life has been brought to Mountain Grove by a local artist with a longstanding pride in her town, and a recently discovered passion for painting.

Arlene Uens, a retired employment counsellor who worked in Sharbot Lake for most of her career, has been beautifying her neighbourhood in Mountain Grove for many years, with flower arrangements under the signs entering town, and Christmas decorations in the village. Now she has added another dimension to that endless project.

Inspired by some of the folk paintings Arlene had seen on multiple trips to the East Coast, she started painting large pieces of plywood around her rural property. What started as a fun experiment turned into a series of imaginative murals that she has been installing in eye-catching displays all over town. As well she has recently started to sell some of her works.

Her work, clearly inspired by her natural surroundings, features loons, herons, moose, and deer amongst whimsical swirls of bright paint and repetitive patterns that draw the eye in.

“I'm a thrift junky,” Uens said about her passion for hitting up thrift stores in search of inspiration for her paintings. “I get great ideas from a tea cup or a little dish.”

Part of Uens' approach is to make the paintings big and bold so that they can be seen from a passing car.

Her paint of choice is Tremclad and she says that her neighbours have been dropping off used cans for her to finish up. In the summertime, she paints in her large barn with the doors thrown open but now that the cooler weather is here she's moved into a room in the house so she can keep warm and keep creating.

“Every day I paint,” Uens said about her art practice.

Along with her painting, Uens has been cleaning up the CP stockyard railbed, which runs from near the hockey rink across to Brock Road, and installing bird houses along the pathway. She dreams of one day having a bird sanctuary in Mountain Grove and also turning the pathway into an “outdoor gallery” with art hanging alongside the trail.

“The goal is to have other artists come in and do the same,” she said. “We have so many artists and artistic people (here),” Uens said. “They are everywhere.”