Tina McCallan with her artwork

Tina McCallan organised the recreation of a famous floral artwork at the 2009 North Show. People were invited to paint a square on canvas in their own style. The finished result was a colourful patchwork of art.

Tina’s life as an artist started in Guernsey where she studied art at the Grammar School before heading off island to pursue it as a career.

Children paint a square of the grid

The artwork used for the North Show piece was by Gustav Klimpt and was chosen because “it’s very kind of flowery, very sugary, sweet, but the girl looks quite confrontational and that kind of reflects the theme of the Battle of Flowers,” said Tina.

Tina cut up a copy of the original painting into 200 squares and handed out the squares for people to copy. “They try to copy the colours really, but as you can see people are allowed to interpret it how they want.”

The perspective created by the different squares is “like looking through lots of different people’s eyes,” according to Tina. “It’s really interesting how one person might see pink in one particular way and another sees it in a different way, but it’s all pink.”

An interest in art that brings communities together has taken Tina from Guernsey to Germany, Turkey, London and France. She has worked on around 20 collaborative art projects, four of these in Guernsey.

“It’s always amazing, you never know how it’s going to turn out and it completely depends on who turns up … it always turns out really well, the secret is the grid, it holds the whole image together.”

Tina is still deciding what to do with the completed picture. “I’m going to talk to the organiser of the Battle of Flowers about donating it to The Princess Elizabeth Hospital to hang in their Art wing.

N.B. The picture can now be seen in the collection of the P.E.H.