Our next P.A. Day Program is Friday February 1,

Jon and I had a baby girl, February 13. Her name is Aoife-Bean, sounds like (Eefa-Bean) 7lbs 15oz. We had a wonderful home birth/ water birth with the Kingston Midwives!

13 Years of excellence in Childrens Programming
Professional Instructors, warm/ creative/ wholesome environment

Absolutely the best quality camps anywhere!
This place is a slice of heaven for children and parents!
Here, young people are free to be themselves and explore their interests in a fantastically inspirational environment
My kids look forward to Y.A.K. Camps all year long
I love the birds, bunnies and the homemade muffins
We receive children from all over the world every summer now
I love Carrie & Christine and all the amazing opportunities they offer young people, I hope they never stop
My kids wont go to any other camp, they absolutely love Y.A.K.

Carrie Whalen, an award winning fine arts and fashion design graduate

YAK is only the latest in a series of arts-related businesses Whalen has started over the last decade. Their genesis was in 1987, when Whalen, then an 18-year-old single mother, enrolled at Kingstons St. Lawrence College. Seven years later she emerged with diplomas in fine arts and fashion design and a bevy of awards for her art and design work, including the Liquitex art achievement award, and fourth-place honors at the prestigious Air France International Young Designers competition in Paris. Whalen was chosen by Pierre Cardin and other great fashion legends as the best young design graduate in Canada and tied for fourth internationally at a competition set in the Louvre in 1994. Whalen also won awards in the Shmirnoff Fashion Design Competitions in 1993 & 1994.

But while she had plenty of job placement offers from design firms including one from Bella Freud, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freuds great-granddaughter and head of a top fashion house, Whalen decided that she was not yet a big-city girl. After a stint working at Freuds in London, England, she returned to Canada.

Back home in Kingston, she took business planning courses at St. Lawrence and launched the Canadian Designers Co-op, a fashion incubator, where early-career fashion designers could design, manufacture, promote and sell their work. The co-op was based in Kingston on Lower Princess St.; a $40,000 Community Action Grant was awarded to Whalen from the Ontario government which allowed her to fill the space with industrial fashion design equipment purchased from the defunct St. Lawrence College fashion design program.

The co-op attracted a steady stream of up-and-coming fashion talent from Kingston and elsewhere, but constantly found itself struggling financially. To help make ends meet Whalen organized fundraising events such as fashion shows and an art camp for kids. Whalen dubbed the art camp Art Attack a moniker she reconsidered about three years later.

I found out there was an English TV show with the same name, she says. So I had a little name-the-business contest with the kids in the program and one of them suggested Y.A.K., Young Artists of Kingston. It was perfect.

Today, YAK operates out of the former Portsmouth United Church, which Whalen purchased in 2002. The 150-year-old structure houses the art classes and a growing collection of power and hand tools Whalen uses to build the tables, trays, canvas frames and other project bases that children later transform into works of art. The building also houses a childrens aviary filled with very friendly Cockatiels and Lovebirds, and a few bunnies to boot.

Since its inception, YAK has grown steadily. Today, in addition to one-week-long summer and March break Art Camps, it offers programs in Theatre, Face Painting, Animation, Fashion Design, V.A.D.A.R. Camp (video, audio documentary reporter), Digital Photography, Special F/X Makeup, Craft Camp, Clay Camp, and yes, even Bird Camp. In the off-season Whalen rents out YAKs chapel as a weekend birthday-party venue. It is also made available for nonprofit arts-related events such as musical performance, plays and so on.

YAK is a full-time job, but Whalen is not one to sit still for long. Along with Christine Harvey, who runs Whalens Theatre programs, Carrie has co-founded The Village Garden Democratic school, which currently operates in Inverary Ontario. The contact phone # is 613-353-7394

Three years ago Whalen started face painting for fun during her summer programs. This interest has turned into a very busy sideline over the last couple years and Carrie has become by far the most sought after professional face painter around. Whalens face and body art is spectacular. Whether she is painting at a large city event like The Kingston Buskers Festival, The Teddy Bear Picnic, The Sheep Dog Trials, or the Lung Associations Festival of Flowers, or private business parties such as her regular gigs for the The Rocking Hoarse Toy Store or The Kingston Public Health Unit, or doing private home parties, Whalen draws a quite a crowd. In the past year Carrie has been hired by several large organizations to teach their volunteers how to face paint and as well has been hired on contract by Queens University to teach face painting and theatre make-up in their SEEDS Enrichment Programs.

CHRISTINE HARVEY
Christine Harvey is an energetic lady, with a Bachelor of Arts Honours in Drama and a Bachelor of Education. She is the founder of the Not So Amateur Amateurs, a non-profit theatre company in Kingston, Ontario. She writes and co-directs for the company. In fact, she has written twenty-two theatre pieces, including two full-length and one one-act musical. Three of her plays have been published by an international publishing company in the UK, 10 have been accepted by a publishing company in BC and some of them are featured in her book, Stage It: Three Plays and a Monologue. Christine has extensive experience in theatre, as over the years she has directed over sixty-five childrens plays, organized numerous drama clubs, taught drama at five different schools, and instructed drama workshops. Other roles have included head of drama for Dreams In Motion (a performing arts school in Gananoque), drama consultant, actor, and performing coach for Childrens Aid Society training videos, and director, coordinator and resident playwright for Young Artists of Kingston (YAK) since 1997. She has acted in commercials and videos, has participated as a performer in Kingstons Standardized Patient program, and is a collective owner and actor in the Spotlight Surfers, a traveling acting troupe that has performed at several birthday parties, schools City of Kingston events, and the Kingston Buskers Festival. She has recently started up a democratic private school which integrates theatre and the arts into all aspects of learning. She is a co-owner of Drama Queens Publishing Company (www.dramaqueenspublishing.com) and has recently won a grant from Curriculum Services Canada to develop a unit to instruct teachers on how to teach playwriting in the classroom. She also runs the Drama portion of the KYAC program in Kingston. Occasionally, she stops to sleep and spend time with her friends, her daughter Cassondra, and her dog, Asia.