Morinville resident and artist Fred Bahr has several of his mixed media pieces on display at the Musée Morinville Museum in downtown Morinville. They are open from noon until 5 p.m., Wednesday through Saturday. – Submitted Photo
by Stephen Dafoe
Fred Bahr moved to Morinville three years ago to be close to his family and is enjoying his time in the community. The retired laboratory scientist and coroner has been painting using mixed media for more than four decades.
“I entered university in a fine arts program and then realized that unless I wanted to be a teacher, I couldn’t sustain myself,” Bahr said. “So I ended up going into science, but always, art was in the back of my mind.”
Later, Bahr was gifted ten art lessons from a realtor who had sold his home. That gift of oil painting lessons got Bahr back into his art. Bahr then attended art classes at the University of Saskatchewan and even went on to teach art in Prince Albert at the community level.
“You start out with a blank piece of paper, and you end up with something from your mind, but you don’t have it totally clarified,” Bahr says of his love of art. “It’s that inner eye within you. It gives you the creativity to make each art piece different.”
Bahr started with oils and moved on to watercolours, which the artist says are far easier to clean up, mainly when working in the field. “I’m from Northern Saskatchewan. The oil got a little messy when the mosquitos attacked you.”
The artist is not partial to human figures and portrait work because he believes the level of detail required affects his creativity. His preference is to paint outdoor scenes, particularly old churches.
“I did a lot of churches because people get married in a church or baptized in a church, and that was always a plus,” he said. “Often, people who do photography take a front end of the church. I have a tendency to go to the back end and view it from a different direction. It just gives a different perspective of the building.”
With 40 years of experience in art, Bahr has had the opportunity to showcase his work many times and also use his art to help the community raise funds.
“The community I belonged to always had a need for money,” Bahr explained. “Our art club teamed up with the local Kiwanis Club, and they would sponsor an art gala for the community where everybody would come together.”
Those ticketed events would raise funds for the community, with proceeds on art sales split between the artist and the cause.
“We raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and melded the community together in that whole process, which is going to this day,” Bahr said.
It is something the 80-year-old artist wants to replicate in Morinville. The local artist recently donated a painting to Fusion Thrift Shoppe as a silent auction fundraiser for the store’s expansion grand opening and said he plans to continue using art to raise community funds, hopefully on a larger scale as he did in Saskatchewan.
Bahr currently has several pieces on display at the Musée Morinville Museum as part of their commitment to displaying the works of local artists.
The Musée Morinville Museum is open from noon to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday. The Museum is located at the back of St. Jean Baptiste Park in downtown Morinville.
