'It's the human connection': Paint-In brings the artists to the people on Moss Street

The Art Gallery Paint-in runs 11 a.m.- 4 p.m. Saturday on Moss Street.

ART GALLERY PAINT-IN Where: Moss Street When: Saturday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., gallery and Family-Friendly Beverage Garden open til 6 p.m. Admission: Free For five hours on Saturday, Moss Street in Fairfield will become a wall of humanity, with an expected audience of 50,000 taking in the Art Gallery Paint-In.

“It’s extraordinary, isn’t it?” said Nancy Noble, director and CEO of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, which produces the annual event. “Fifty thousand people — most people don’t even believe it until they come here. And then they believe it.”

Lining both sides of Moss Street will be a record 183 artists from Vancouver Island and neighbouring Gulf Islands who have the day to showcase their works, including painting, sculpture, arts and crafts, and related ephemera. The largest summer arts festival on Vancouver Island, and one of Greater Victoria’s signature events, provides quite a canvas for the artists involved, some of whom will see this degree of exposure at the 37th annual event for the first time in their careers. That it remains free is a big benefit for people on both sides of the easel, as it exposes people who might not feel comfortable at an art gallery to the community of art on Vancouver Island.

“We get a lot of people who might not typically come to the art gallery, and that’s the point,” Noble said. “It also exposes those artists to buyers, and that’s also the point.” Broadmead painter Sally Chupick has a booth at the corner of Moss and Carnsew streets this year, and will be showcasing her oil paintings for the fifth time in her career at the Paint-In.

“I love it,” Chupick said. “It’s the best way to connect with art lovers in Victoria. Love doing it.”

She will have both large and small panels for sale, as well as her always-popular ‘minis,’ which are three inches in size and painted on pieces of reclaimed cedar. Those have been conversation-starters in previous years, Chupick said. “What artist doesn’t love to hear, ‘I love that!’

It’s the human connection. And its fun. It’s exhausting, but it’s worth doing.”

There is a full line-up of events in and around the AGGV, the central hub for the event located at the northern end of Moss Street near Fort Street. A family-friendly beverage garden will be stationed in the gallery’s parking lot from 11 a.m. until 6 p.m. During the same time frame, the gallery itself will be open to visitors, with admission by donation, Visitors will be sample summer exhibitions in addition to selections from the gallery’s permanent collection. There will be a show and sale in the Massey Gallery, with over 90 local artists participating, while the Spencer Gallery will spotlight local artisans in the BIPOC Teen Art Residency Show.

Exhibition tours of the gallery by Asian Art curator Heng Wu (1-1:30 p.m.) and contemporary art curator Toby Lawrence (2-2:30 p.m.) are also being offered. Outside the gallery, the event is expected to be more active than recent editions. The City of Victoria is allowing Paint-In producers to use the entirety of Moss Street, which was not possible in recent years due to ongoing construction nearby.

An improved interactive map available at the AGGV website will give attendees locations of where participants and key components — such as donation barrels, whose contents are put back into programming at the gallery — are located. With a busy summer schedule, having more room to move is a blessing, Noble said. “There’s always a lot of things competing with it.

But we’re expecting big crowds.” Though the upcoming Paint-In will be her fifth since joining the AGGV, Noble said she’s blown away each year by the event’s durability. While her current day-to-day tasks are almost entirely consumed by planning for the new art gallery, she marvels at the continued relevance of the city’s near-iconic art stroll.

“For a city this size, and an art gallery this size, doing this kind of event is what makes it so special. If you look across the country, you don’t get one-day festivals this big in very many places, if at all. We’re very proud of that.”

It faces many of the same hurdles other festival must contend with, however, such as increased security costs, which came into effect last year following the incident at the Lapu-Lapu Day festival in Vancouver last year, where a vehicle driven into the crowded festival resulted in the deaths of 11 people. “Now look at what just happened in Toronto,” Noble said of the incident at Toronto’s Salsa on St. Clair festival, where a shooting that took place Saturday left two dead. “We have to be very mindful of security, and those costs escalate every single year.”

Streets that run across Moss Street now require barriers prohibiting vehicle traffic from crossing. MAC Reno, an event sponsor, is providing a fleet of trucks that will serve as barriers, saving the art gallery “a massive cost,” according to Noble. “It takes a village, I tell you.

It takes a lot of people to make this happen.” The future home of the AGGV is the lands around the Capital Iron building, which are being redeveloped to create an arts and innovation district extending from Chinatown to Rock Bay. The proposed gallery building, situated at Store and Discovery streets, is expected to be the centrepiece upon completion, approximately seven years from now.

“It has become very real,” Noble said. “But we’ve got a long way to go. It is many, many years away.”

For this weekend, at least, her focus is on the Paint-In. “I tell everyone I run into about it, and they are all shocked that we can actually do something like this,” she said with a laugh. “When I tell my colleagues across the country, they are astonished.

Astonished. “It’s a social outing, inevitably. I have run into people here from my hometown in Saskatchewan, who I haven’t seen since I was a teenager.

It is a very small world. I see people at the Paint-In that I don’t see the rest of the year.”