ABOUT US — principals
“How important are the arts in our society? I feel strongly that the visual arts are of vast and incalculable importance. Of course I could be prejudiced. I am a visual art.”
— Kermit the Frog, muppet
Principals
Peter Blacklock has spent his career in drama and education as a teacher, administrator, writer, and actor. Following his retirement teaching in the public school system of British Columbia, he completed the writing of a musical production built around the life of painter and writer, Emily Carr. The show was first produced as a festival piece in the Shuswap and the Okanagan.
Since then he has gone on to write numerous plays. His play entitled “A Very Silly Script” was produced by the Pend’Oreille Players in Newport, Washington and won the First Place Playwrights Award. Others of his plays are published through Big Dog Publishing in Florida and are available through them.
Peter is a great asset to the community in many different ways. He is multi-talented and well known in the area for the summer dinner theatre productions at Haney Heritage Village. He writes the musical plays based on local history, writes the lyrics and composes the songs for the musicals, and casts and directs it!
It was his creativity, boundless energy and passion for his art that founded Ida and Old Baldy’s Seniors’ Theatre in Salmon Arm and Blind Bay, which now keeps many of us entertained and enthused in the program year after year. In 2013 he received a grant from the Federal New Horizons Fund to produce a seniors’ theatre handbook that’s available online to anyone who wants to learn how to begin a seniors’ theatre program in their own community.
Peter continues to write and is currently working on the scripts for several plays. He is an active member of, and continues to perform through, Shuswap Theatre. Most recently, you may have caught his act in “A Pack of Lies” or “Trying.”
Joyce Adrian Sotski was a pioneer in interactive digital media. Her work as a developer-designer of interactive CD-ROMS and websites dates back to the early 1990’s. It started with film and video classes that shifted sideways into what was then a new phenomenon called interactive new media.
She began freelancing, developing projects for clients by teaming up with specialists in other disciplines. In this way, they, as a group, enhanced their ability to produce media that was both cost-effective and creative.
Her clients included small businesses and non-profit organizations as well as the Department of Saskatchewan Education and Learning. The educational websites continue to be utilized by students year after year — “Saskatchewan Artists Ignite,” “The Great Depression” and “Saskatchewan Stories.” Saskatchewan Stories, which played freely and creatively with new media ingenuity won significant national and international awards.
Her career history prior to freelancing includes a 25 year career as a graphic artist in the printing industry as well as a summer stint creating the graphics for CBC Evening News in Regina.
Joyce has been passionate about the arts throughout her life. She works digitally as well as in oils, watercolours and graphite. In Saskatchewan she belonged to the Federation of Canadian Artists and has shown her work in the Rosemont Art Gallery at the Neil Balkwill Arts Centre as well as the Joe Moran Gallery in Wascana Place.
With her move to the Shuswap, she has begun to explore some of her other interests. She experimented with public speaking through Toastmasters and emceed local events on occasion. At this time, she is retired from the work force and is happily exercising her creative muscles in writing and literature as well as visual art.
© The Third House, 2015