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Art Crawl first-timers include old-school goldsmith

This year’s Sunshine Coast Art Crawl will be the biggest in its eight-year history, featuring 165 venues, with 63 of them becoming part of the three-day event for the first time.
goldsmith
Lesley Finlayson and her father, Ian Finlayson, at the goldsmithing bench that will be part of the Art Crawl experience for visitors to their Gibsons-area workshop and studio.

This year’s Sunshine Coast Art Crawl will be the biggest in its eight-year history, featuring 165 venues, with 63 of them becoming part of the three-day event for the first time. Among the new venues this year is one of the Coast’s high-end jewelers, Finlayson Goldsmiths. 

“We’ve wanted to become part of the Art Crawl for a few years but there had been scheduling conflicts and we couldn’t do it,” said Lesley Finlayson, the company’s designer, and daughter of master goldsmith Ian and retired jewelry designer Claire Finlayson. 

On the Coast since 1991, the Finlaysons have been working out of their residential workshop/studio off Oceanview Drive outside Gibsons since 2007. But it’s not your everyday jewelry shop. The bulk of their business is in custom-made works, not products chosen from a typical display counter. 

“With this October in mind, and when we found the time, we would make projects to put in the showcase trying to build a bit of inventory for the Art Crawl,” Lesley said. 

Ian spends his day at a work bench on the first floor of the family home, across from the display and office area where Lesley does her design work and consults with clients. Art Crawl visitors will get a chance to see both sides of the operation. 

“I am setting up a project in different stages, so I can explain to people who come just how we go from this to that,” Ian said. 

The Finlayson distinction is in doing it old-school – creating forged, handmade rings and other jewelry, an increasingly rare technique. More than 90 per cent of modern jewelry is cast, that is, made by pouring melted metal into a mould. Finlayson, on the other hand, is a forger and smith, creating his own metal mix and then rolling it out, hammering, cutting and shaping pieces into a work that looks and feels unlike any similar design that has been cast. 

“The strength of a cast piece also is not comparable,” added Finlayson, who learned his trade as an apprentice to Vancouver master goldsmith Tony Cavelti, and later working with the equally renowned designers Alois and Thérèse Lander. 

Lesley said they deal mostly with local customers, but it’s her father’s professional pedigree that brings visitors from off-Coast. “Most of our out-of-town business comes from people who know who Tony Cavelti is and they’re looking online trying to find a Cavelti-trained jeweler,” she noted. 

This coming weekend will be an opportunity for more locals to see what the fuss is about. 

The 2018 Art Crawl has venues featuring a variety of jewelers and all kinds of other artworks, stretching from Langdale to Egmont. It runs from Oct. 19 to 21. Brochures and maps are widely available and can also be found online at sunshinecoastartcrawl.com