A Once in a Lifetime Opportunity

Every now and then an opportunity falls into your lap that's just too good to be true.  Such was the case in the summer of 2019 when I suddenly found myself in charge of painting a ceremonial tepee for Native Child and Family Services Toronto.

The tepee was to be set up for the IRSS gathering in July in Nathan Phillip's Square, Toronto.  My wife is Director of Holistic Services at NCFS, and they were having trouble securing a First Nations artist in time to get the tepee done.  So with the meter running, she offered me up.  I'm not First Nations, but I am Metis.  However, I had never in my life painted a tepee, and so I must confess to a tinge of wariness as I accepted the job.

The agency was most of the way there on the design.  It was to incorporate their logo and a cityscape to represent Toronto running along the bottom.  I added some wavy lines with stenciled animals as a border and a forested representation of Toronto Islands across from the city.  I submitted a design in colour, which was quickly approved.

Now all that was left was to paint the actual tepee.

I had everything to learn.  What type of paint would be best?  How easily would it spread onto the canvas?  Could I make the lines sharp or would they diffuse?  Would the colour change as it seeped into the beige of the canvas?

I bought some paint and pieces of canvas at Home Depot to do some test painting.  The tepee's colours would be drawn from their agency palette.  So with their glossy annual report as reference, I worked with the Home Depot paint person to match the colours.  I was advised that an exterior acrylic based paint was the way to go.

When I painted my test patches, I found to my relief that the paint didn't bleed too badly upon contact with the canvas, and I was able to hold fairly sharp lines.  Also, I was quite close with matching the colours, and a mere tweak would be needed to get it right when I bought the bulk paint for the job.

I estimated, based on zero previous experience or data, that I could do the job in 4 days.  Luckily Native Child had the perfect impromptu studio for me: a former retail store at the Malvern Town Centre in Markham that was slated to be renovated into one of their facilities.  It was a vast empty space with old floors that weren't being kept, drive-up ground floor access to the store entrance, and its own air conditioning.  I couldn't have dialed up a better space.

So novice was I to tepee painting that I needed to be sure I even had the right side facing up before starting.  For the proper advice I phoned the company that makes them and talked to a very friendly rep who not only helped me determine which end was up, but offered up his best sales pitch about the tent's paint-readiness, citing an enormous and ridiculously diverse list of substances that could be successfully applied to cover said tent.  I felt more confident than ever that my Behr Exterior Alkyd paint would do the job. 

The plan for Day One was to get the design mapped out, and if possible begin to apply paint.  I started in pencil after which I moved on to black paint.  The interesting thing is that the final tepee is a conical shape once it's erected, so the design doesn't map out on a standard x-axis, y-axis grid.  The important thing is that any lines that would appear vertical in their final form actually need to converge towards the small circular opening at the top.  Basically, it's a fan-shaped design with all lines leading up.  So I mapped out a series of radial lines from top to bottom like spokes on a wheel.  When I sketched out the buildings of the city for example, they actually lean in towards one another as they rise.  Once the tepee takes on its conical shape, everything will look like it's pointing up.  

This was a front-loaded job in terms of expenditure of brain power.  I took my time with the layout because it was the one time when a miscalculation or two might have yielded unexpected negative consequences.  It's a bit like getting the proportions right on a world map before wrapping it around a globe.  But after a few hours of pondering and sketching, the mapping was done in pencil and I was able to start outlining in black plus add a few areas of colour down as a painting guide.  End of Day One.

The big news of Day Two was the arrival of re-enforcement in the form of art student Talia, the daughter of one of my wife's co-workers.  She had actually been available for all four days of the project, but I figured the first day would have constituted a lot of waiting around while I methodically planned the design.  Now with Talia here it was full steam ahead.  

The plan was to have the large areas of colour filled in so that I could spend the next day on the Agency's logo, which I thought would be the most challenging thing still left on the to-do list.  As Talia applied the three main colours I focused on the cityscape that decorated the large yellow band at the bottom.   We were right on schedule by the end of the day.

For me, Day Three was logo day.  It was the last major challenge left on the project, and it would be important to nail it for a couple of reasons...it was large in scale (three feet in diameter), and would more or less be the focal point of the finished tepee.  Also, anyone who works for the agency is intimately familiar with own logo since they see it on a daily basis.  I like to be 'free form' with my art, but this was an occasion where accuracy reigns supreme.

I mulled over the technical complexities of making some sort of giant print to trace, or possibly projecting the logo from a laptop onto the canvas and tracing that.  But at the end of the day I reckoned I could use the standard technique of mapping it with a grid and free-handing onto the tent.  That proved to be the ticket.

While I tackled the logo, I had Talia work on the animal stencils that grace the colour bands of the tepee.  The agency had pre-approved animal images that they provided us in jpeg form. She used the laptop screen to trace the outlines of the animals on construction paper and these were used to stencil the animals in an alternating pattern around the tepee.  End of day three.

Day four was spent finishing up various odds and ends left over from the previous three days.  Filling in areas of colour, adding the feathers to the logo, two medicine wheels near the top, and touching up mistakes and inconsistencies.  We both signed our names and took photos with the final result.

And at last in July 2019 I was able to see the fruits of our labours in the plaza at Nathan Phillips Square.  I feel I can say (without a trace of bias) that our tepee stood out from the crowd.  So satisfied was I with this project, that I wouldn't hesitate to do another one, should this once-in-a-lifetime chance occur once-yet-again.