The Saugeen Times

Tara artist has work featured
at Victoria Park Gallery
By Liz Dadson

A&E

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Pam Edmunds of Tara stands with her photo-on-canvas artwork of an old building on her neighbour's property

Pam Edmunds of Tara designs signs and does some photography as a hobby.

Now, her photography-on-canvas artwork is taking centre stage as she is the guest artist for the month of April at the Victoria Park Gallery in Kincardine.

"My main business is signs and design," says Edmunds who owns and operates Just For You Signs and Designs in Tara which she opened in 2008.

"I learned the craft from an old sign painter," she says. "I've been painting signs since 1996, but I've always enjoyed photography. My mom had an old camera and I played around with it. It's like another art form."

Now working mainly with digital photography and computer photo programs, Edmunds says she bought a 54-inch printer about a year or two ago and began putting photos on canvas frames.

"I did up a few pictures and took them to some trade shows and fairs," she says. "People seemed to be quite impressed with them."

She dabbled in it a bit more, taking photos from friends and family and putting them on canvas frames.

"I have folders of photos, such as the yellow flowers which I brought to this show (in Kincardine)," says Edmunds. "I pulled it into Photoshop and tweaked it a bit so it would look more like a painting, and put it on canvas.

"The yellow flowers photo-on-canvas is one of the first ones I did. I thought it was neat. I took the pieces to shows and people really liked how cleanly they were framed."

It was at the Tara Craft Show that she met Sharon Pike, a member of the Victoria Park Gallery, who invited her to exhibit her work in Kincardine.

"This is my first gallery show," says Edmunds. "I brought nine of my works, but I have about 20 of them in total. My favourite is the picture of a barn. The picture of the cat is my cat, Bailey, and the photo of the yellow flowers was taken in my apartment in Fergus."

Edmunds has a five-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Karley, who helps her with the signs and wants to be an artist, just like her mother.

The Victoria Park Gallery is located in the Kincardine Arts Centre in downtown Kincardine, and is open Monday to Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, noon to 3 p.m. It is open until 9 p.m. during theatre shows and special events.