Water
I live beside great lakes, have a cabin on the shore of Georgian Bay where lake effect bestows more precipitation than anywhere else in the vast province of Ontario, Canada.
When I began painting at age 13 I learned with watercolours. Every summer my dad and I enrolled at the Mary Schneider School of Art and painted en plein air – often we painted moving water in streams, waterfalls, waves.
At University I switched to acrylics, age 18, looking for a greater intensity of colour, but still found myself working in washes. I’ve tried oil painting several times and although I appreciate the stretch and muscle of it, I miss what water does. The collaboration with water on a canvas or on paper is me, in and with my element.
Water finds a way to move, always. I like to control only so much of where and how it wants to go in a piece.
Into 2023 and beyond I’m leaning in to this collaboration process with water, further loosening my control over what happens in the living wet to see where it will take us.