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June 20, 2013 Volume 12 • Number 25 50¢ Newsstand Price
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Fresh summer Blenz – page 5 Your neighbourhood. Your newspaper.
An evolution through art and writing Back in 1970, Elon Newstrom was inspired to take an old tricycle down to the yards in Vancouver to have it run over a few times by a steamroller or two. It was to become his first sculpture, and once it was assembled - with concrete and rebar – and ready for installation, he named it Child’s Brain. In retrospect, it was a perfect expression of where he was at, though he was unable to articulate it at the time. Elon was still in the throes of addiction, struggling to recover from what he learned through hours of therapy to be an abusive childhood. After a time spent displayed in front of the Architecture Building at UBC and then being passed from friend to friend as a novelty, the sculpture was cast aside at some point and now rests deep in the Ladner landfill. Over 40 years later, well into a long recovery from childhood pain and substance abuse, he has created another sculpture on the same tricycle theme that brings his healing full-circle. “Last January I enrolled in Doug Buis’s sculpture class at TRU. I’d
had a second trike for a few years, sitting on my front porch waiting for another steamroller opportunity to recreate the original piece,” jokes the local artist and writer. “But evolution had something else in mind. My focus started to shift. I’d done that inner child work and realized I’m not that abused child’s brain anymore.” So he reached back to claim some fond memories from his early years, and created Meccano Child
– a small boy fashioned out of ‘meccano,’ his favourite childhood construction toy – who sits atop the tricycle, ready to ride. But the use of artistic outlet in the healing process didn’t stop there for Elon. While working on the new
Local artist Elon Newstrom with his first sculpture, Child’s Brain (inset) and his more recent creation, Meccano Child.
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piece, his writer’s mind was triggered and he wrote a poem based on a story about his own childhood curiosity. The World on Rigsby Street, Penticton, 1948 describes his fascination with motor vehicles, and how he was drawn to them from an early age, first in the voice of his mother as she told the story to him, then from the perspective of the child himself in the final stanza. “I have always been writing, carving, puttering in the arts, but I had very low self-esteem and just didn’t have the audacity to call myself an artist,” says Elon, who doesn’t only selfidentify as an artist these days, but has boldly – and successfully – curated his own work into a public space. “I was at Caffe Motivo, talking to Ian Harding, telling him what I was up to, and he offered me his window to display the sculpture and poem together,” boasts Elon, who then had the poem professionally printed to display with the sculpture, both of which still greet customers as they walk into the Victoria Street coffee shop. – continued on page 2
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