Stolen canvas recovered.

The night after Alex Cieslik took the top prize of $1,000 in a city sponsored graffiti contest, another one of his paintings was sliced from its frame outside Little Mountain Studios on Main Street.


“Alex was outraged,” recounts Ehren Salazar, who co-runs the gallery where Cieslik’s “Misty Morning Vietnam” was stolen. “He sent out a mass email.”


“[The television news] heard about it and sent a crack team of reporters here. They were here for maybe 10 or 15 minutes before they had to run for some breaking news about a city councillor being charged for drunk driving or something.”


But the day after the nine-foot-wide painting was stolen, it was suddenly returned by “a guy who lives a block and a half away,” Salazar explains. “He was having a smoke outside an elementary school when someone approached him for a cigarette.” The man bought a painted canvas for $10 instead of passing out a smoke.


The original piece had been screwed to the exterior wall of the gallery, where the sliced canvas remained — the clue the unwitting buyer needed to put two and two together.


“As we were leaving the shop, these two guys walked up here like magic,” Salazar says. Cieslik bought the painting back for $10, and a promise to paint a new piece for the men who’d returned the canvas.


“Then the news ran the next day, but really it was no longer missing.”


The painting’s is valued at $1,700.