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When he's not teaching high school students science, Mennonite Brethren Collegiate Institute's Andrew S. Hiebert can be found making art, some of which is on display right now to view free of charge in St. Boniface.
Hiebert says that his love for art started when he was young, and became a therapy as he got older. "When I was in church, I would be drawing pictures of tractors. I was the school cartoonist and my dream was to become an artist."
While art didn't pan out as he had hoped, he made the switch to science and became a teacher at MBCI. While teaching high school students physics and chemistry, Heibert still had the passion to create.
"I found myself just going back to art as a therapeutic practice. I discovered the life-giving effects of it, I began to do it more and more. Then it moved from a therapeutic practice to a discipline practice and now it's a professional practice that I have."
While he admits he wasn't ready to teach art when his teaching career started, he says that his confidence has grown over the years, and is comfortable putting his work on display. "When I went into teaching, I didn't have any art training, I didn't have any confidence that I could be taken seriously in an art context. For many, many, many years, as I developed my art practice, I kept it completely secret because I had such low confidence. In the last seven years, my confidence has grown enormously. Now I feel very comfortable sharing what I do and inviting people to come take a look and engage with me visually and artistically."
Hiebert is inviting Winnipeggers to come and see some of his work, in what he calls a journey of love. "It's a complete solo show and the work is sort of an allegory. There are about 13 different pieces and each piece has a different component of the journey of love, and each piece can stand alone by itself, but it has a group."
He says that from start to end, the art tells a story. "It tells a story that love is actually a journey rather than a single stage that you fall into and fight desperately to stay in and don't want to grow out of. I think love grows. It's organic and dynamic and the art in the show changes and the styles evolve. Things sort of move as you progress clockwise through the show and it ends with a big dramatic signature piece that sort of encapsulates sort of what I feel the ultimate goal of a relationship and love can look like."
While there's one piece that stands out among the others, Hiebert admits he wasn't sure if he would be able to pull it off in the first place. "The signature piece of the show is a large 66-inch by 66-inch painting on unrolled canvas. It involved all kinds of styles and concepts and integration of materials that I had never done before and I had a vision for what I wanted to accomplish, but I didn't know if I could do it."
The signature piece combines his faith, with some fond memories. "It's called a Mingling of Three Parts. It summarizes what I believe it takes for love to be strong in a relationship, and that there has to be a mingling of three parts. From a Christian perspective, God is a third part that has to be involved for things to be strong, and then in the painting, the foundation and back layer of the painting is a scriptural passage from my wedding."
He says, "I think it has a beauty that people don't even have to know the full story of what all went into it, to appreciate that, hey, this looks attractive. This looks interesting and there are things going on here that the more they look, the more they can find."
The art show is free of charge at La Maison des Artistes Visuels Francophones at 219 Provencher Boulevard in the old City Hall building.
Descriptions on each piece can be viewed here.
It's open Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays from 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
"Come on down, it's a beautiful space and I think that anybody who comes will have a nice opportunity to reflect and think about their own journey of love and how they think about love and what love means," he says.