The Downtown Stratford BIA is excited to share “in the moment” images of our latest public art project that is gracing the wall at 118 Ontario St.
The theme for this mural is “Stratford Music” – showcasing all the wonderful musical talent that grew up here or had an impact on our city over a significant period of time. Some names are very well known and others you may be surprised about!
As the art is only able to accommodate so many names – and our list extends way longer – ALL artists will be captured in our Spotify playlists. Split between four umbrella genres, you’ll be able to enjoy all that Stratford has to offer – whether it be opera, broadway, punk, rock, blues or other!
We can’t wait to see the finished product!
“I am a Canadian Maritime artist working across landscape, figurative, and abstract work, drawn both to the memory of place and the emotional residue that lingers after a moment has passed.
My work holds the juxtaposition of the world’s beauty alongside my own formative experiences of that same world not always being safe. In this light, I choose to see creativity and goodness as an act of rebellion and healing.
Nature and figures are painted as dynamic, alive, and emotionally charged. Gold moves through the work as an act of repair; a way of acknowledging fracture without concealing it. Mended seams left visible, these marks hold both what was broken and what has since been restored.”
Shane grew up in a large family in a small Saskatchewan farming community, with no TV, no radio, and not much in the way of modern distraction. What he had was drawing, and that turned out to be enough. Art became the thing he kept returning to, and eventually the thing that defined him.
He traded the prairies for Ontario, then Ontario for the East Coast, and is now based in Fredericton on the unceded territory of the Wolastoqiyik people. His landscapes draw from the broader Maritime coastline: the Hopewell Rocks, fishing villages in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, lighthouses in PEI.
Alongside this, he works in figurative painting, abstract composition, and large-scale public murals. Commissioned mural work spans civic, corporate, and community contexts, including projects for Google, TD Bank, and Communitech, as well as the award-winning public mural “Farms to Families” in Simcoe, Ontario.
Years in creative leadership and design have brought a certain discipline and structural thinking to his fine art practice. He is recently expanded his practice through the CATAPULT program with ArtsLinkNB. When not painting, he finds quiet focus building Lego, which is, it turns out, an unexpectedly effective counterbalance to life in the studio.
