Funkydoodad: an Etsian to get to know

May I introduce you to an Etsian, a friend, and a person I am mentoring into the joys of Etsy? Rhonda Bobinski, selling under her Etsy name of Funkydoodad, was first of all a student of mine when I was a Guidance Counsellor at Red Lake District High School in NW Ontario. After attending University, she returned to Red Lake and joined the teaching staff of the school as its Art Teacher. We worked as colleagues for several years before I retired. In a brief biography, Rhonda writes:






Rhonda Bobinski has had the advantage of growing up in Northern towns across Ontario and Manitoba; picking blueberries under a hot sun, paddling a canoe down a lazy stream, listening to the cry of a lone wolf. It is inevitable that her surroundings are going to influence her artistically.

Rhonda left Red Lake, Ontario, after high school to obtain her Bachelor of Fine Arts Honours Degree, then carried on to receive her Bachelor of Education degree. In between raising her son, and creating nature inspired art, Rhonda also teaches Art at the Red Lake District High School.

Rhonda is a multi-media artist that enjoys integrating several art mediums and techniques into one art piece. She enjoys using lost and forgotten mediums such as coffee and candle wax, but also enjoys going back to a purist perspective and using mediums as they were originally intended.

Rhonda works in a variety of movements, from Abstract collage to Expressionism to Realism as well as a variety of styles such as photography, watercolour, found object colour, jewelry and printmaking.

I hope you will visit Ronda's Etsy shop and see the samples of her work there: www.funkydoodad.etsy.com.

I can't be that old!

I developed a Facebook Fan page for my business (JohnToftBasketry). For a week or so, I was the only fan. Now there are four in addition to me. Three of the Fans I knew. But a fourth was a puzzle. The Facebook photo showed a lovely young woman in an old fashioned hat, dress, and with a feather boa, posing in front of an upright piano with sheet music on it. Her last name, Reid, struck a cord.

In my first year of teaching in Red Lake in 1972, a young woman in one of my classes was named Maureen Beck. (Maureen will tell you that my class was the only one in her whole high school career that she was asked to leave and wait in the corridor for the teacher, me, to come and speak to her.) Maureen graduated, went on to University, and returned to teach. Somewhere along the way, she married and became Mrs Reid.

Her mother, Lois, was one of the people through the years I would go to church meetings with throughout NW Ontario. Travel to such meetings could be as long as 10 hours in length each way. Could this new Fan be the daughter of Maureen and the Grandaughter of Lois? Was I really that old?

The young lady confirmed that she was indeed Maureen's daughter, and she currently attends the University of Winnipeg. She also mentioned that her Grandmother still has a basket of mine!

Woodland Metis Art

We lived in Red Lake from 1972 to 2001 for the largest part of my teaching career and for the first years of my retirement. While there we were exposed to the native art scene that had its focus there. Wickepedia labells that First Nation Art movement as "Woodland Metis Art." Its leaders included Norval Morriseau, the first native artist to have an exhibition at Ottawa's National Art Gallery. While we did not have the opportunity to purchase any work by Morriseau, we did purchase these two examples of work by another artist in that school, Peter Kakegamic


I added these works to the Vintage section of my Etsy shop yesterday. We do not have enough wall space for all the art we have now so we are making some efforts to downsize the art collection. That effort is a necessary one to make since, just before Christmas, I pursuaded Anne to purchase another painting for me. This was a painting by ex-student of mine, one I taught Geography to and rugby in my early years of teaching at Rideau District High School in Elgin, Ontario!