When the random pairings between letters and artists happened in the Alphabet Project, the paintbrush of fate swept the letter F to a perfect recipient.
Doris Dittaro might have D alliteration in her name, but she identifies with the letter F for what it represents. F is for flower.
"My favourite thing to paint is flowers," she said. "It couldn't have worked out better." She used the opportunity to slap on an extra layer of meaning, as well, by making her image that of a petunia.
"They are one of those flowers so common in flower beds, and that goes back a long time. Petunias would have been the first or close to the first domestic flowers ever brought to Prince George when the first gardens were planted at the first homes in the early days of settlement," she said. "They were a good fit for our climate, and they are still one of the first you see blooming in spring, on days like today."
Flowers may be her specialty, but Dittaro is a gymnastic kind of artist, easily shifting from portraits to landscapes to nudes and semi-nudes to scenes of life. Her most famous painting to date is entitled Home From The Rink and depicts a candid image of two children walking through the snow with hockey sticks and skates over their shoulders. It has a Norman Rockwell quality to it, but an all Canadian spirit.
This painting was selected to be the image for the hundreds of VIP cards distributed by the 2015 Canada Winter Games organizers.
Flip through the below slideshow to view the Alphabet Project art and a link to each artist story:
This was its second flurry of life. Home From The Rink was also one of the featured paintings in a calendar once sold by Papyrus Printing featuring the Milltown Artists, the famed group of six painters all based in Prince George, all women, that included Dittaro. The other five artists were Anne Bogle (she did the letter B in the Alphabet Project), June Swanky Parker (her letter is coming up), Ruth Hansen, Caroline Moorhouse and the late Vivian Antoniw.
Another calendar they did was a portrait series of the core musicians in the PGSO, as a fundraiser for the local symphony orchestra.
They were also hired by the predecessor of Tourism Prince George to paint all the main bridges of the city as a community marketing project.
"As the Milltown Artists, we did a lot together. We would take workshops together, go out on painting excursions, lots of travelling for our art. The biggest feather in our cap was when we were commissioned to paint the Alexander Mackenzie Trail. That exhibition travelled all over and ended up at the Royal Museum in Victoria. We went in by truck and horseback, parts of that trail are really remote, and then we went off tenting to different parts of the trail area. Each of us did five or six pieces for that exhibition. It was one of the last shows ever done at the old Prince George Art Gallery before it moved to become the Two Rivers Gallery, and the old space became the gift shoppe for Studio 2880."
It was only recent months ago that Dittaro was the feature artist in a solo show at the Two Rivers Gallery, and she is working towards a solo exhibition she hopes will be accepted by the Community Arts Council for their feature gallery back in that original gallery showspace at Studio 2880.
"I keep at it," she said. "There is always more to learn and more ideas to put down on the paper or the canvas. I prefer paper. I always loved art, but I really learned to do it by taking small workshops, and it just grew from there. We (Milltown Artists) did a lot of them together. We went to Saltspring Island, the Shuswap, Jasper, down to Wells frequently, and we went to Southern France for a month."
Dittaro was a founder of the Studio 2880 Artists' Workshop group that is still operational today, and she has long been a supporter of the development system that culminated each year with the BC Festival Of The Arts.
"It was wrong to cut that event back," she said, wagging a paintbrush at higher levels of government. "They never should have stopped supporting that to the fullest. The money was always very well spent. It was so important to the host towns all over the province, and it was important to all the artists who were involved. I want to see them resurrect it."
When Dittaro first heard that the Community Arts Council and The Citizen were collaborating to do the Alphabet Project she thought it an interesting coincidence that she was in Victoria at the time, opened the local paper down there, and discovered it had been there too. But the page she saw had all the letters on one sheet of paper, not a new one displayed weekly so as to give the art and the artist room to be displayed.
"It is amazing to see all these artists doing this kind of work in Prince George," she said. "Artists need to work together, and work with a higher purpose. I love seeing some of my favourite local artists doing their letters, and I just can't believe how many are new to me."
The arts community - one she had a hand in creating - is certainly blooming in this city, and Dittaro's blooms are still just as bright.
