A visual history of Kamsack’s doctors, from the community’s beginning when Kamsack’s main street was little more than a few wooden buildings along a wide dirt trail, to today, was created on a mural that has been placed on a hallway outside the main treatment rooms at the Assiniboine Valley Health Centre.
The mural, which is shaped like a giant open book, was commissioned by the Assiniboine Valley Health and Wellness Foundation and was funded by the late Casimir Broda.
Initial plans were to have something like a wine-and-cheese social to mark the placing of the mural last month. But, with Broda’s death in December those plans were not completed, said Anne Schlivert, the manager of the Foundation.
The Foundation had issued a call for proposals for a “legacy art project” at the clinic to honour the contributions medical doctors have made in the community, Schlivert explained. At a size of about nine feet by seven feet, the mural was to depict doctors, past and present, a commitment to the community, and note the cultural community in which the doctors functioned.
Hired to create the mural was Dean Bauche, a professional artist and cultural consultant who had attended high school in Yorkton and worked in North Battleford as director of galleries for the city and his job included directorship fo the nationally-renowned Allen Sapp Gallery.
Known primarily as a portrait artist who integrates portraiture and a depiction of people into a sense of place, Bauche has been commissioned to do murals and paintings by a number of institutions including St. Piux X Seminary in Saskatoon, the Saskatchewan Hospital in North Battleford and the Olympic Run Legacy project for the Sports Hall of Fame in North Battleford. He has done a mural in Prince Edward Island as part of the Island’s Confederation celebrations and a mural for the Battleford Boys and Girls Club.
Bauche said his Kamsack mural would be on mounted composite aluminum using oil paint with a protective finish.
An adjudicator for the Organization of Saskatchewan Arts Councils, Bauche said his art “endeavours to explore all the dimensions that make us human: spirit, mind, body and place.
“The creative drive that shapes and forms my art is a need to ‘seek communion,’ communion with myself, with others, with God. Each subject offers its own emotional energy, shaping the nature of the expression.
“Painting portraits is akin to a process of stripping away what I know stroke by stroke and attempting to reveal or discover what is hidden. I think when all the stripping is done and a work is successful, we are left with something closer to truth, beauty or mystery. These, after all, are the invisible things, enclosed by the flesh.”
