It is not just the scenery that make this such a great place to be. The people here can be just as interesting, as photographer Bev McMullen found out

This past holiday season I had the pleasure of working with Lindsay Fay, a photography student shadowing me during the Christmas season for her field placement from Fanshaw College in London. Her major request was to be “in the field” and work with a professional photographer. Although we were extremely busy with photo shoots I wanted Lindsay to experience something special, so we headed out to Burk’s Falls and the home of artist and theatre teacher Peter Camani.

Camani is famous for his eccentric art, namely the screaming head statues that dot his property like the pillars of Stonehenge, but even we were in for a surprise as we came face to face with our own version of Big Foot.

I had always wanted to meet Camani who is a martial arts expert, a farmer, painter and sculptor. He lives in a castle complete with two fire-breathing dragons on top of the chimney. I contacted him and asked if I could bring Lindsay to tour and photograph his giant cement sculptures and castle and was a bit disappointed when he said that he would not be home, but we would be more than welcome to visit.

It was a dark and wintry day when we arrived at the castle and entered through the massive doorway. There were stone lions, mane-deep in snow, and the dormant dragons watching our arrival. We chatted back and forth and grabbed our cameras to start shooting when we both screamed as a voice came up behind us. The artist was home! I was thrilled to meet him as I had wanted to take a portrait of this free spirit for years.

Wanting to create a true portrait of this well-known character I assumed that most eccentrics own a cape to add some drama to proceedings, but Camani came up with a better solution. A new Sasquatch suit.

He began to run through the deep winter snow, climbed a giant spider’s web and posed beautifully with his screaming head statues. I asked him if his inspiration was from Edvard Munch, the Norwegian painter of The Scream, but he said his heads were about seeing no evil, speaking no evil and hearing no evil. He also believes in permanence and is inspired by early Britons, and especially the Druids. He wants his art to stand for centuries and not be destroyed like other great structures throughout the centuries.

His homemade giant skull disks are lined up in his fields like a modern-day stone hedge screaming to eternity. When the sun rises, one side of each head lights up while the other side is in darkness; one side benign, the other sinister. It is an impressive sight.

After being outside, Camani welcomed us into his home. If you think the outside is fantastic, the inside is just as good. Camani has been an artist and teacher since the mid-1970s and his work is like Salvador Dali meets Edgar Allan Poe, with scatterings of dungeons and dragons and bell jars of questionable squishy things. One room was wall-to-wall peacock feathers and a set made up for a theatre arts play.

On our way back to Bracebridge I looked at my shell-shocked student who probably wasn’t expecting to ever have a day like that. “You wanted to be in the field,” I said.