LOUISA KRATKA (she/her)

VIOLIN / FIDDLE / MUSIC INSTRUCTION: Louisa teaches violin and fiddle privately, online an in-person from her home studio in Guelph, ON, Canada. (See Lessons page)

Louisa began her violin studies at age 4 with Helen Tobias at the Hamilton Suzuki School of Music, then privately with Mark Fujino for many years, and then later with HPO violinist, Misha Brat. She successfully completed the Royal Conservatory of Music’s Grade 9 violin exam in her teen years. As an adult, she has taken numerous workshops to deepen and broaden her music education. These have included Olifiddle workshops, improvising and deep listening workshops and music for dance.

Over the years, Louisa has participated in music performances and festivals (Nuit Blanche, Guelph Jazz Festival, Guelph Contemporary Dance Festival) where she performed as a vocalist / violinist, solo and in ensemble, with dancers or other musicians. She has sung in choirs (Mohawk College Singers, Hamilton, ON, and with Ondine Chorus, Guelph) as well as participated in solidarity events, such as Women Life Freedom concerts (2022-23). She has co-ordinated community concerts and a music component for Climate Action Week in Guelph (2019), including the conducting of a string ensemble that performed a conceptual piece illustrating the warming climate with increasingly higher pitches, represented by each instrument in the ensemble.

Louisa taught violin with Long & McQuade Music Lesson Centres for approximately a decade.

Louisa Krátká as a multi-disciplinary artist, art & music educator and bookbinder.

Louisa attended the Nova Scotia College of Art (Halifax, NS, Canada), where she studied jewellery design, printmaking, textiles and book arts. After graduating with a BFA in 1999, Louisa worked as a children’s arts instructor for two years at the Burlington Arts Centre, teaching a course she designed entitled ‘Sound, Music, Art, Laughing’. Children made home-made musical instruments, listened to many genres of music, learned about the elements and principles of design, played music together and had fun.

After taking many courses in bookbinding, and completing an exchange in her final year of NSCAD at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, Louisa founded and ran her part-time business, LK Bookbindery, in 2003 until 2018. Its website www.lkbookbindery.ca is no longer functional, but its contents - specifically, photos of custom designed books, artist books and kids creations - are being integrated on this page: Book Arts. For nearly a decade (2008-17), Louisa facilitated bookmaking projects with with hundreds of children at many Ontario schools as an Artist in Education, which was made possible with multiple grants from the Ontario Arts Council’s Arts Education program.

This work brought together her interests and experience in bookbinding, drawing, printmaking, calligraphy as well as teaching and community arts. You may listen to Louisa speaking about this venture and chapter in her life, in her interview with an enthusiastic Dan Evans of the radio program ‘Books for Breakfast’ on CFRU’s University of Guelph campus radio. Louisa took part in festivals such as Guelph’s Art on the Street (2008 & 2013), and Grimsby’s Wayzgoose (2013) and OCAD’s Book Arts Fair (2004), and taught book arts workshops at the Guelph School of Art and The Print Studio / Centre3 (Hamilton) and various other venues including backyards and artist studios, including her own shared studio at 490 York Rd in Guelph.

Louisa’s research interests, activism and ideas about the natural and spiritual world

Her past academic research topics include toxics in the visual arts, pollutants, environmental justice and human-driven climate change. Her spiritual interests range from empathy and wisdom from trauma, healthy expression, walking / yoga / dance / movement and inspiration derived from beauty and the natural world.

CONTACT

louisakratka [ at ] gmail [dot] com or by phone

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