The famous portrait that once hung in the Winnipeg Arena is being restored by local artist Amanda Von Riesen.

WINNIPEG – This is not a hockey bar.

There aren’t any TVs, or jerseys or memorabilia. A blues band plays underneath a neon “Country” sign. A poster on the wall reads, “What Would Neil Young Do?” Hipsters and miscreants dance. Whiskey pours.

A local artist enters, with her hair down and a tattoo of a musical note on her forearm. She pays the $10 cover and grins at the bouncer, who gives her a hug.

This is Amanda Von Riesen, Winnipeg hockey hero.

She is the least likely sports celebrity in this town, and she’s still pretty stunned by what’s happened over the last few months. People have listened in on her conversations at restaurants and even interrupted them to speak with her. At a fair where some of her paintings were being shown, a member of parliament recognized her just because of what he read about her in the news.

“I do want to be known,” she laughs. “But do I want to be known for this or for my own art?”

At this point, she doesn’t have a choice. She is known for this. She is known as the woman who helped save the Queen.

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Von Riesen has plenty of friends in the music community, both here and in Nashville, and late last year she got a call from one of them. Her name was Janice Starodub, and Janice had a friend named Anya, and Anya had this painting.

Von Riesen, who is from here, gets these kinds of calls all the time. She obsesses about paintings – the ones she’s done, the ones others have done, the ones she wants to do. She texts about paintings the way baseball scouts text about pitch counts. (She even painted a portrait of the outside of this bar.) But as Janice kept talking, and telling Von Riesen about this painting, she realized this was not just any painting. This was a famous painting.

Back in 1979, when the WHA crumbled and the Jets moved into the NHL, the Winnipeg Arena had to be expanded to accommodate more fans. That year, the lieutenant governor of Manitoba commissioned a portrait of Queen Elizabeth, which was to be hung in the rafters. It was meant to replace a less flattering portrait in the arena, and it did more than that: it became one of the more iconic parts of hockey.

The portrait was enormous: five by seven metres (15 feet by 22), built on oak panels, and it took 200 hours to complete. Over the years, it became the target of many practice pucks – almost like how punters aim for the huge scoreboard at JerryWorld. It was the largest oil painting of the Queen known to exist at that point, and over the years it grew to be a part of Winnipeg lore. There was Her Majesty, placed between the U.S. and Canadian flags, looking over one of the loudest and zaniest places in sports, smiling regally with curtains in the background, as if she was gazing down from a private box. She was part of home-ice advantage.

“It wasn’t just hockey games, either,” said local historian Christian Cassidy. “A lot of important city events took place in that building.”

Then, in 1996, the Jets were gone, to Arizona. And then, in 1999, the Queen was gone, too.

View photos The famous portrait that once hung in the Winnipeg Arena is at a secret location while Amanda Von Riesen touches it up. More

For the better part of the next 15 years, the Queen was a nomad. She moved from place to place in Canada, with several interested buyers but no one able to figure out where to put a portrait that size. Finally it ended up in the Camp X Historical Society in Ontario, named after a World War II secret agent training facility. One of the more visible faces in the hockey world had gone dark.

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