We’re having our Sept. Sale. I can’t believe it———— Summer disappeared in a flash. Well —never give up, never surrender. Onward and upward. —-We’re having a culture day evening on Tues. Sept. 12. Connie is going to do a pottery ‘throwing’ demonstration, and I’m going to talk about and show how I work with metal and my plasma cutter. It could be fun.
For those of you who have just discovered us, I thought I’d give you a bit of Pike Studios history. I started the studio in 1972 (51 years ago) in the Eauclaire District in downtown Calgary. After a couple of years I moved the studio into an old sawmill in Bragg creek. The studio was there when I met Connie in 1977 at the Banff School of Fine Arts where she was taking a pottery course. We decided we loved each other enough to team up, so we moved the studio to Lavoy Alberta in July of 1978. (about 110 km East of Edmonton and 12 km East of Connie’s home town of Vegreville). We moved into the old Bricker store in Lavoy and started our life together. It’s now been 51 years since Pike Studios was created, and things have not always been easy. We bought half interest in a friend’s property in Bragg creek in 1981 and moved the studio there and figured we had found heaven. Then the Trudeau National Energy Program hit Alberta and sales crashed, and then I was smitten with severe environmental health problems (caused by formaldehyde in the chip board I purchased for ware boards in our studio.) A double whammy that made us move the studio back to Lavoy which we still owned. We moved 18,000 Kilos of stuff each time we moved. No easy job.
We were still partners in the Bragg Creek property but it was not working out and we found a way to purchase the other half from our friend and then move back to Bragg Creek. We were there for about ten years then had to move again because of my health problems. Somehow we always found a way to keep on going on. We moved the studio to Sherwood Park and had a very nice place in the country but it turned out to be much too damp for me (mould problems) and after three years had to move again. So —- here we are in semi arid High River living in a house with no basement. (no mould problems) and have had our studio here for the past thirty some years. We had thought about downsizing and moving into the city but then we would have to give up our beautiful studio and the comfortable work spaces we have created for ourselves. We still have a lot more to say about the arts, so we will keep on going on. Come to our sale and say hello.
