Artist draws on contacts to launch co-op
The Toronto Star
Thursday, May 28, 1992
By Sharon Crawford
Special to The Star

Art is driving Susan Walker-Ing up the walls and she loves it.

In the past year, the York University fine arts graduate has co-founded Creative Connection, a co-op art centre in Aurora and initiated the painting of two wall murals in Aurora.

She illustrated the nursery rhyme "Mary, Mary quite contrary" on the walls of the Aurora Nursery School in Trinity Anglican Church. Then she borrowed five artists from Creative Connection to help students and teachers at Wells St. Public School paint a mural of trees in the school foyer.

Walker-Ing, 34 and the mother of three sons, says her role was to "inspire" the students to depict their dream tree.

The murals, although fun, were done while Walker-Ing continued work on her main artistic concern, Creative Connection.

Walker-Ing, who has long envisioned a community-based art centre in Aurora, says Creative Connection's beginnings go back to "Artisans of York days."

The Artisans of York was formed in 1979 as a group of area artists and crafters who met at Aurora's historic Church St. School and held several annual sales. The group fizzled out in the mid-1980s, but their bank account remained, as did the friendship of two members, Jean Little and Susan Walker-Ing.

In the summer of 1991, Jean Little told Walker-Ing they could probably get a spot in St. Andrew's Village Shopping Centre. The manager, Ryan Stone, gave them a centrally located shop, rent-free from June to October, 1991.

"Fired up" by Little's enthusiasm, Walker-Ing met with area artists to set up a summer show at St. Andrew's Village. She brainstormed with her sister-in-law on running the centre. And she contacted some former Artisans of York members and discovered the Artisan's bank account still existed. Its $700 was officially transferred to Creative Connection.

But, says Walker-Ing, "it only had three or four members that whole summer." Walker-Ing carried around membership forms in her car and handed them out to all her friends. She regularly called on Aurora Mayor John West for help.

"Then, one day, 50 orange chairs arrived from the Town of Aurora," Walker-Ing says, her face deadpan.

The Town of Aurora later gave Creative Connection a $1,000 grant to hang its art in the new town hall.

Creative Connection held its first show in St. Andrew's Centre last August.

"Twenty per cent of sales came back to the centre," says Walker-Ing. Their Christmas show was a sellout and they needed a treasurer to handle the sales.

At first, "(it was) a bit of a struggle to get classes going," says Walker-Ing. But, "by March break, we didn't even have our flyers, we had 10 or 12 mothers phoning (for classes) so it's really starting to connect," Walker-Ing says.

That, says Walker-Ing is Creative Connection's purpose - "artists connect to each other and then back to the community."

The centre is open Monday through Saturday for classes and sales to the public. Items for sale include watercolors, acrylic and oil paintings, jewelry, leatherwork, photography and stained glass. Centre members pay a membership fee and receive a certain percentage for items sold based on the amount of their participation in duty time or committee work.