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Artist Profiles
July 2010
~ by Rebecca Hazell
September 2009
~ by Bernice Ramsdin-Firth
August 2009
~ by Gloria Lorenzen
July 2009
~ by Liz M. Forbes
June 2009
~ by Karen Allen
May 2009
~ by Bruce Whittington
April 2009
~ by Kate Sutherland
March 2009
~ by Tom Masters
February 2009
~ by Gloria Lorenzen
December 2008
~ by Roxanne Strasbourg
November 2008
~ by Rebecca Hazell
October 2008
~ by Kate Sutherland
September 2008
~ by Sylvia Holt
August 2008
~ by Gloria Lorenzen
July 2008
~ by Liz M. Forbes
June 2008
~ by Gloria Lorenzen
May 2008
~ by Bruce Whittington
April 2008
~ by Rebecca Hazell
March 2008
~ by Tom Masters
February 2008
~ by Ron Greenaway
January 2008
~ by Liz Forbes
December 2007
~ by Elizabeth Symon
November 2007
~ by Longevity John Falkner
October 2007
~ by Yvette Stack
September 2007
~ by Kate Sutherland
June 2007
~ by Bruce Whittington
May 2007
~ by Lesley Hammocks
April 2007
~ by Tom Masters
March 2007
~ by Theo Gustafson
February 2007
~ by Bernice Ramsdin-Firth
December 2006
~ by Theo Gustafson
November 2006
~ by Dorothy Jeanne Engst
October 2006
~ by Bev Mountain
September 2006
~ by Liz M. Forbes
August 2006
~ by Lesley Hammocks
July 2006
~ by Dorothy Jeanne Engst
June 2006
~ by Lesley Hammocks
May 2006
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Eugene Jobagy - The Artist and the Dreamer
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~ by Karen Allen
Soapstone carver Eugene Jobagy's artistic career has carried him along a journey of twists and turns where each artistic endeavor emerged from the strengths of the one previous. A meticulous, patient and intense soul, Eugene has submerged himself in each artistic pursuit with enthusiasm.
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| Eugene Jobagy |
An artist and an innovator, Eugene has been interested in art all his life; in youth it began as an escape. He did a lot more painting and drawing in his younger days and started carving soapstone in the late 1970's. In his carving technique, Eugene utilizes chisels rather than rasps. Each new piece begins with an uncut slab of stone while the artist carefully removes bit by bit the elements that do not belong to the final image, the stone itself giving way to the finished piece. Many finished pieces remain very close to the original size of raw stone with very little change. His 2009 SASS~e entry, "The Dreamer", appears if it had lain for centuries, awaiting the carver to release it from its obdurate prison.
"I started with the face and then it became a sleeping native, so I had him wrapped in a blanket. The rest of the stone I left for a while. I just walked away from the piece and it just came to me what he was dreaming of. The eagle's beak is on the right side representing reality and the left side is the graphic representation of the spiritual. I just take away the little extra bits and let the image come out."
Eugene's natural talent expanded into a vast arena of media through innovation and experimentation. In the late 1960's, Jobagy got involved with silk screening and at that time series prints were just beginning. They were popular in New York but very little was being done on the West Coast. He was making prints of original artwork in Edmonton and selling them in Vancouver using a line camera and darkroom technique to create hand separation of colour.
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| Dreamer, by Eugene Jobagy |
This led Jobagy to create his own t-shirt transfer process and from there he moved into the highly specialized field of set-up and photography of displays for catalogue production. Here drawings would come in from the art department to be sketched onto ground glass. A sheet of ground glass is used for the manual focusing of both still and motion picture cameras. The display would be set up, lit, and the camera, resting on an 800 lb tripod to minimize vibration, was angled to capture it. During the catalogue off-season, Eugene spent hours in the dark room study photography and experimenting in the dark room. "I used to lock myself in the darkroom with stacks of books on photography."
Eugene applied what he had learned in photography to audio-visual production and commercial illustration (photographic) for the likes of the City of Edmonton and the Alberta government. From the insight into business gained from commercial audio visual production, it was natural to move into a ten year stretch of woodworking and designing displays for trade shows.
In 1990 Eugene embarked on a fascinating three year period of innovation and design at Miniature World in Victoria. His design team was responsible for the current space exhibit. Visitors find themselves inside a space transporter looking out into space. The producers from Star Trek had come up and had done a walk through of Miniature World and they were amazed at the model of the space station. When the Star Trek television series, Deep Space Nine aired, which was based on life inside a space station, you could not help but notice that the story curiously resembled the story board Eugene and his creative team plotted for Miniature World.
When at last he entered cooking school, Eugene didn't think it was something he wanted to do. After a month's training at Camosun, he was hooked. His love was for pastry work especially and included the carving of tallow, chocolate, and working with spun sugar to create marvelous 2D and 3D pieces such as a perfectly formed pair of sculpted dancers, or an exact reproduction of Victoria's Chinatown gate in exquisite relief.
Eugene's education includes Architectural Technology at NAIT and the Banff School of Fine Arts, but he is mostly self-taught, "it doesn't matter how much you read or know about something, when you actually do it that's when you learn, I have always looked for the creative drive in things, the creative opportunity, which is how I came to baking. I never pursued the money; I always pursued the creative outlet."
The journey of an artist may follow many twists and art is found everywhere you turn.
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