Artists Karsten Coty-Scholl and Sonaiya Cormish open a joint exhibition on Saturday at The Art Gallery Osoyoos. Coty-Scholl has discovered charcoal after doing portraits of movie characters in oils. Cormish does ceramics that are functional and artist and use glazes to show off the texture. (Richard McGuire photo)

The two artists whose show opens Saturday at The Art Gallery Osoyoos both work in very different media.

But Karsten Coty-Scholl and Sonaiya Cornish have something in common – both were once graduates of Osoyoos Secondary School.

“I thought that with what happened with the school when we thought we were going to lose it, it would be cool to have a show with two people who had graduated from Osoyoos Secondary School and went on to pursue their passion for art,” said Sue Whittaker, gallery curator.

Both graduated some years apart.

Coty-Scholl, the younger of the two, paints portraits often taking a pop art approach to movie characters.

His work in oils was so impressive that he was given a solo show at the gallery in 2015 at the age of 21 – believed to be the youngest artist ever to have a solo show at the gallery.

Cornish is roughly 15 years older than Coty-Scholl, but she has boundless energy that takes her tree planting and on ski patrol when she’s not teaching, studying or creating ceramics.

“I call her my mountain girl,” said her mother, Gayle Cornish, marveling at her daughter’s energy.

Coty-Scholl still lives in Osoyoos, where he works at the Osoyoos Visitor Centre.

Cornish currently lives in Nelson, where she’s doing self-directed study in ceramics after completing a two-year program at Kootenay Studio Arts in Nelson through Selkirk College.

Whittaker says she’s known Cornish since “practically when she was born,” because her own daughter is close in age to Cornish.

She has some of Cornish’s pottery, including a bowl with holes in the bottom allowing air to circulate and prevent fruit from going bad.

“It’s very beautiful,” said Whittaker. “It’s kind of a mint green and then it’s got some grey in it. It’s quite different than any pottery I’ve ever seen.”

The colour, said Whittaker, is the result of the glazing techniques. And the pottery is both practical and artistic.

Gayle Cornish said her daughter has done a lot of experimenting with clay and glazes, doing hundreds of glaze tests.

“I can’t believe how much she produces,” she said.

Sonaiya Cornish describes her ceramics as “strong” and “heavily influenced by nature.”

“I look for glazes that show off texture,” she said. “A lot of my work has texture.”

She said her ceramics would appeal to people who want something functional that also makes an artistic statement.

Asked about how his work has changed since his 2015 show, Coty-Scholl said he’s in a stage of experimentation.

“I’m at this exciting stage in my work now where every different piece I’m learning so much,” he said. “The next piece is so much different than the last. It’s exciting because I don’t even know where this is going to go.”

He said he’s also doing more portraits of local people and people he knows instead of just celebrity portraiture.

His work has been “almost a parody kind of cartoon style with expressionistic colour,” he said, but recently he’s found a new love for charcoal.

“I’m right now on the cusp of being almost as excited with charcoal as I am with oil, so we’ll see what that yields,” he said.

Coty-Scholl also has a strong work ethic and when the Osoyoos Times interviewed him in 2015, he had just pulled an all-nighter working to finish some of his oil paintings in time for his solo show.

He told how he first got into art, it wasn’t so much because of the OSS art curriculum, but rather it was because of a girl he liked.

“She was into art and I wanted to impress her,” he recalled. “She said ‘Oh, I would love to see your work.’ So I went home that day and I drew the whole night from when I got home. From then on, it was always part of what I was doing.”

Although the girl was impressed, she never became his girlfriend. She did, however, motivate him to pursue his art seriously.

“It worked out beautifully,” he said.

He committed himself to seriously learning about art, trying to educate himself about it and focus on his goal. He’s taken workshops, but is mainly self-taught.

Whittaker says the gallery tries to provide a mix of local artists and non-locals.

“I try to make it a good balance between people from away and people who live here,” she said. “The Art Gallery Osoyoos is getting a lot of attention from people outside of the area now because they would like to show in our gallery. So the word is out there. It’s a dandy little place to have a show and it’s not overly big. I think it’s being looked on as a really cool place to have a show.”

RICHARD McGUIRE

Osoyoos Times

A portrait by Karsten Coty-Scholl.

Ceramics by Sonaiya Cornish.

Karsten Coty-Scholl, pictured in 2015 when he did a solo show at the gallery, is back in a show starting on Saturday where he shares The Art Gallery Osoyoos with Sonaiya Cornish. Both Coty-Scholl and Cornish are former graduates of Osoyoos Secondary School. Cornish, a potter, currently lives in Nelson. (Richard McGuire file photo)