INUVIK
Maidie-Anne Turner is branching out.

Inuvik multimedia artist Maidie-Anne Turner is back at the Great Northern Arts Festival with more of her eclectic range of artwork. - Shawn Giilck/NNSL photo

The self-taught Inuvik multimedia artist and long-time Canada Post employee who takes a free-spirited approach to art is back at the Great Northern Arts Festival with a new selection of arts and crafts that illustrates the breadth of her interests.

"Which art?" Turner asked with a laugh when asked to describe her style and genre. "It's all over the place. It's whatever whim hits me at the moment.

"I really don't know how you'd describe it," she said, still laughing but clearly pondering the question as well.

She was working on a gorgeous sunset/sunrise painting during the interview. Turner frequently works on landscape art, perhaps as much as stained glass, but it would be very difficult to recognize her art, because she has no "set style."

"My stuff doesn't tend to look alike," she said with a hint of pride.

"This is the first time I've ever done (painted) rocks," she said. "So this is very cool."

She had a second landscape work on the go as well, a stark winter scene with that familiar bluish tint that's so common in the Arctic, and was planning to add a polar bear to it when she has a chance.

Turner also had samples of her stained-glass products, which is where she started her artistic career, and paper-based baskets, some of which she said were made from "100 per cent Northern newspapers."

Many of her inspirations hit her while watching television at night, Turner said.

She's one of the lucky types who don't fall entranced in front of the set. Instead, ideas run wild through her head while she sketches or paints or does other activities.

"I'm still watching and following (whatever is on television) when I do that," she said. "It's one of the ways I multi-task."

"I can't just sit there and watch TV," she said. "But I do really watch it. When I'm doing stuff, less is more. That's why I'm often drawing. It lets my mind open up to other things. The less I think about what I'm doing, the better it is."

In other interviews, Turner has described how she never considered becoming an artist when she was younger. It took living in Inuvik to bring it out.

"I learned from scratch, and I was never really an artsy kid."

Turner said she liked carving in school, but that was the extent of her artistic impulses when she was younger.

She's lived in Inuvik for 40 years and this is where her passion for art flowered.

Some of her work is realistic while others verge on the abstract, but it's all distinctively "Maidie in Inuvik."