We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Rhonda Evans. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Rhonda below.

Hi Rhonda, thanks for joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

“Here is your art after it was presented […] We were so proud to present your work on behalf of the Canadians, as a token of appreciation for the relationship between the Belgians and Canadians! The city/town is in the province of Flanders! Such an appropriate gift! The Canadian Ambassador was thrilled that we had a Canadian artist with poppy paintings!!!! You were a hit! There will be other presentations of your work … so at least 9 more times!” Diane and Marc LaFortune.

This was the first of 10 original pieces of my work that the Canadian Embassy has presented as gifts on behalf of Canada.

I have chosen to work in several mediums using poppies as my focus. Subsequently I’ve had the privilege to send silk scarves and fused glass pendants for our Embassy to use for gifts as well. I’ve been told the first necklace was gifted to the Ambassador from Indonesia as a thanks for her service in The Hague on behalf of the Canadian Government. The British Ambassador’s wife has a necklace as well as a silk scarf and when presented this she stood and read my biography to the audience and thanked our Embassy for such beautifully crafted work.

The Canadian Ambassador’s office has a poppy painting of mine hanging in the office, and this April I have been invited to go over to be part of a presenting pieces of my work on behalf of the Canadian Government to be gifted to a restaurant, that is affiliated with the Canadian Legion in The Hague. This will then hang there in perpetuity.

Diane and Mark LaFortune are friends of mine and he is the attaché to our ambassador in the Hague. One of their jobs, is to bring gifts for the embassy to use for different occasions. They have been waiting to find the right time to use my work to represent Canada and this is it!

I work in poppies, because I love the deep rich colours.the way the paint moves and flows when I am working on this collection, similarly to the fused glass and the dyes when doing scarves…… I have vivid memories of them from my grandfathers gardens where I grew up playing during my childhood. But there is more…
“Our red poppy is a symbol of both Remembrance and hope for a peaceful future. Poppies are worn as a show of support for the Armed Forces community. The poppy is a well-known and well-established symbol, one that carries a wealth of history and meaning with it.” From the Canadian Legions page regarding The Poppy.

So my husband and I will be travelling abroad on April 13 and this will be something we get to do shortly after we arrive. We will spend some time in the area. There is so much history and we would like to go visit as much as we can. Museums, galleries, cemeteries, and Fields of tulips growing that time of year and so much more. We will then continue to travel for a couple of weeks together and when my husband comes back to Canada, I am meeting a contingent of artists that are flying into Rome and we are going on a painting retreat in Tuscany for two weeks, can you say bucket list!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I have my shower biography and artist statement listed below this story because although they tell a lot there is so much more to me! And I know I’m going to give you more information by the way of this dialogue.I feel all of these components are what made me who I am in so many ways. And it’s taking me a long time to send this back to you because there is so much to my story that I didn’t really know where to begin so I decided I would just tell it all and let you decide what you wanted to ask about.

I was born and raised in Newfoundland, My parents had a restaurant franchise called Mary Browns. When their 10 year renewal came due, they decided to move to the “Mainland” as we call it. With family in Montreal, also from NL, kingston was close enough to visit, and somehow seemed the perfect location because it could support their needs to expand the franchise, and more importantly, well to my mind anyway, it was on water! And to a Newfoundlander, this was big! So 4 days after I graduated high school, the trucks arrived we moved to Kingston Ontario. As many will tell you, there’s something about that old rock that call to your heartstrings when your from there and it wall always be “home.” I have vacationed there many times, especially when my grandmother was alive, but will never go back to live.
Much has changed from them until now, I worked on and off with my parent, as an only child they have always been very important and we are very close.
I’ve always been involved in the arts, from a small child, I would paint with my grandfather in his studio, Walter, or Grampie as I called him, was a very big influence on my life…. He was trained by his mother to paint. She would give he and his sister, Kay, lessons healing down on the floor with a chair to use as their table in the kitchen as she prepared meals etc, This was on a small fishing village island off the coast. He was sent to university, trained as a Chartered Accountant, yet art was always important. He also taught me “ if you own something, no matter it’s worth, it’s meant to be used…. “ His family rain a business , and mother saved everything good in a trunk, My grandfather never understood why she tucked everything away… he never understood that, so in my experience as a child the best paints and sable brushes he has were there for me to use and he was so proud to share everything with his family, especially his grandchildren!
My aunt Ellie, was also intricately connected to my arts side. She moved to the small town I had been living in to continue her career as a dancer instructor, Her school became my happy place and got me through my high school years. It was a freedom so good for my mental health. Small town living was hard… but that’s a story for another day!
Academics were also important. I worked hard in high school to do everything I need to go to University, Yet, my last semester, I had freed up space to do a lot of arts programming. Drama was so much fun and we had professionals in the industry to work with. My first real art teacher Peter Sousi thought I had talent and should go to an art school. I said, and remember so clearly responding “ no one makes a living doing art” so I turned down his offer to help make a portfolio and maybe even pull strings to get me into the Nova Scotia arts and technology at the time he was affiliated with, and thought that was the right place for me. He said you could do jewelry, graphic arts, textiles anything you want and be good at it!” I didn’t listen, then, but I will say the 25 years later I reconnected with him to tell him how right he was to know that that’s what I needed to do. I wasn’t ready at the time I guess and tried many other things but eventually I went to Saint Lawrence College here in Kingston and did a three year graphics program. And the rest is history. But that’s a really good base for my life story. Because Newfoundland moulded me and has influenced everything I do. The friendly disposition of Newfoundlanders and the “come on in the doors always open“ mantra of life conduct my every day.

To me everything above was who/what made me. So as I said, I went to school for graphic arts. 121 people on day one 21 people graduated three years later. It was hard and I loved it.
Coinciding with schooling when I met my husband who was a dairy farmer. We met on a blind date. My 25th birthday.. it didn’t go so well we didn’t really like each other a whole lot, and for a couple of years even avoided each other in situations that we were together his best friend, my best friend when they were together one of us if we were there would leave. That sounds really stupid but it’s true. However, on the night they got married, he drove me home and kissed me on the cheek. Good night, and we’ve been together ever since.
There was a time when we thought we would this area, he would stop firming, and we were going to move. He was going to tell his family, his father, who he worked with every day. Small family Farms are hard work. He was not happy being a farmer., it was never what he wanted to do. Plan to get married and move. Maybe he would go back to school become a teacher , do journalism or do something different…. This part sounds really hokey, but it’s true….
We booked our honeymoon with our travel agent on and with our travel agent on a Tuesday evening, and I said to her” do me a favour don’t run that on my credit card, wait until tomorrow morning when we know this is what we want to do” The next morning he was going to tell his dad that we ere going to move, etc… . But this happened instead…. before he had a chance to tell his dad, his father had a stroke, four days later, his mom slipped and broke her hip. Both of them left the farm in ambulances and were never able to return to the farm. Let’s just say changed our entire life trajectory.
We married, and Pat continued to work on the farm, I worked in the graphic industry locally for a couple of years, and we started our family by moving back up onto the farm. I started the side of the road from our farm, I opened a commercial greenhouse, I would teach classes regarding planting and building planters, etc. I started working with glass and doing mosaics on windows and started painting again. One of my classmates from graphics came to work with me after working in the newspaper industry after its crash. So then we started teaching more together and had fun playing in the greenhouse is just another medium of colour to play with. And her name, Adele Webster , and I went down the rabbit hole, teaching classes and painting, doing fiber, art, and so much more.
In the meantime, I opened a food truck, and I treated food like Art. Everything was a little better than the average cooking. Just another Art in the restaurant industry to me this was easy, but was definitely hard work.
I would do my food truck at many art festivals. It was a big hit!
As time went on Adele and I built a very good business And moved into an art hub in Kingston together called the Tett centre where we shared the studio, worked on our own stuff and top classes together. When the pandemic hit, Adele moved home, working on her own thing and I was still going into the studio. We decided to , quite amicably I eventually moved back to the farm. Adele stayed at the Tett for a little longer and I believe is now working from her home studio. Recently, we have sold this farm and are looking at a new home where I will relocate and put a huge studio in the bottom of The house so that I can teach and create all the mediums that I work in.

Take from the above, but you will but all of this put me where I am today my painting habits seem to drift towards flowers, and poppies in particular. Which have brought me a little notoriety . And in about 10 days I am travelling to the Hague which I have described below. In a press release that a recently given to a local magazine.

I work in fiber, I do needle, felting, needle, punch, and Rug Hooking. I so, and use my machine as, another painting medium. So I thread paint I work in acrylic I work in watercolour I do an acrylic pouring medium. I have a kiln for fusing glass and a dabble with pottery and I do mosaic glass. I teach classes and everything other than class. That’s one thing I keep to myself.

What I didn’t say above is the Family farm? Our daughters are now the sixth generation from Irish immigrants that moved her during the potato famine,. Glocca Morra Farms.
So, as I have evolved over the years, I called my food Glocca Morra Grill, and old farmhouse became Glocca Morra Studio. I have sold my farmhouse, which ended the food truck. This was my commercial kitchen and studio. But the studio has lived on. and when we move from here this summer, I will take the name with me for my studio. (but the name of the property will remain Glocca Morra, because that was part of my sale to the developer that recently purchased our farm.

My current…

Rhonda Evans trained in the graphic industry, working now as a multidisciplinary artist, working with Ink, A variety of Paints, Fibre, Glass, Wood…having fun exploring, rarely planning where a piece of art begins, except perhaps choosing a medium at that moment allows the freedom of starting with no preconceived idea of what it should be, no pressure, free flowing creativity. She would rather choose a subject matter and re-create in multiple mediums compare, reflect, and then move on.
Many think this is chaotic,…. “Focus on one medium and stick to it. Perfect it.” “Definitely Not!” Says Evans. “There is no right or wrong. You do you, and I’ll do me.”

Rhonda’s work has been endorsed by the Canadian Government as her work with images of poppies, as paintings, on silk scarves and as glass jewelry have been used as gifts by the Canadian Ambassador in The Hague since 2020. The first piece was a 6×12 painting gifted to the Province of Flanders, in the Netherlands. And since then a glass pendant was given to the Ambassador from Indonesia as she finished her term in office in The Hague as a thank you from Canada for her service. A silk Scarf had been gifted to the Ambassador from Britain’s wife at a function where she read the biography of Rhonda to the room. The embassy has approximately 12 paintings, 12 necklaces and 12 of the painted silk scarves.
In Spring 2024 Rhonda is traveling to The Hague to participate in the gifting of her painting, currently hanging in the Canadian Embassy, to an establishment open to all public to dine or simply visit, and is affiliated with the Canadian Legion, in The Hague. It will be a thank you from our Canadian Ambassador for their continued support for our service to Canadians.

( My husband and I fly out on 13 April and on 16 April. This is when this presentation will happen. We will stay in holiday for a couple of weeks. We are visiting friends in different locations and then he is flying home on 5 May. I’m staying in Italy and doing a painting retreat with a group that are flying in from Canada. I’m meeting a very good friend on this group and we are going to stay for an extra few days go to Venice and back to Rome before flying home on the 22nd )

ARTIST STATEMENT

As a multidisciplinary artist, I work in so many mediums. Ink, A variety of Paints, Fibre, Glass, Wood… I have fun exploring and I am rarely planning when I begin a piece, I like the freedom of starting with no preconceived idea of what it should be. So much less pressure, allowing a free flow of creativity. So many of people think this is chaotic.” Chaos some say – Maybe! But this is ‘making’ ~ and anything is possible

Here is the edited biography in 100 words:

Rhonda Evans, residing with her family on Glocca Morra Farms in Kingston, is a trained graphic designer turned art teacher and multidisciplinary artist. Her work is inspired by vivid memories and nature’s beauty, using various mediums like paint, ink, fiber, glass, and wood. She believes that art is essential for mental well-being and aims to transport viewers to magical destinations through her artwork. Rhonda’s art reflects the diversity of colors and textures found in nature, experimenting with different subjects and mediums to create unique styles. She embraces individuality in artistry, rejecting the idea of sticking to one medium to perfect it.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

At this point in my career being able to get up in the morning and know that I get to create every day is my reward. having worked in so many different ways putting Art as a twist on everything I do including supply, teach for school board here in my area. I like to add Art as a twist always. There’s nothing better as a teacher whether it’s for school or for my own students watching when someone else realizes that they do can be creative and that, even when you think you’re not, I can bring something out in my students to show them that yes they can be and that it is a great way to early mental stress. I have a teaching strategy that I use for that and putting it into practice school groups and businesses as a team building practice

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I think everything I wrote in the beginning is probably my journey and resilience so I won’t bore you by doing it again

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @Rhonda_Evans_Artist @GloccaMorraStudio
• Facebook: Glocca Morra Studios
• Linkedin: RhondaEvans
• Other: I am the least proficient in this area…. But I decided to take down my messy website and I am working on a new one that I hope to have up sooner than later.

Image Credits
Taken by Me, My daughters Anna and Sarah Doyle