Earl Graham

Time Passes

Earl Graham is a self-taught realist painter who learnt his craft from studying the Old Masters. He probes the corners of individual's worlds through architecture, history, faces with great caricature, and landscape that stops you in your tracks. These paintings represent fragments of a lifetime that are tied to a broader universally shared humanity.

Earl feels that the emotion of a subject is as important to the creative process as the proper use of color and form. He intensifies the mood and subject in his work by experimenting with light. Through his use of vivid colours, he makes tangible his passion for life.

Janelle Houle

Pimatishiw (Alive)

Nature has always been a theme in my art, and while I grew as a ceramic artist this theme became more personal. It evolved into having a purpose, of exploring who I am as an artist and what I want my work to represent. By exploring traditional designs from my Metis heritage, I have been able to incorporate my culture into my work. My work shares the beauty of the Metis culture and classic floral emblems in a contemporary way.

Pimatishiw means “alive” in the Michif language. This collection includes a group of hand thrown vessels painted delicately with floral emblems meant to mimic the flower beadwork of the Metis people. Among the florals, each vessel is home to an animal found here in the Prairies. The pieces are all different yet there is a connection felt, just as all beings are interconnected in one way or another.

Forouzandeh Kasrai

Raku Pottery

Working with clay is hard, time consuming and can be quite complicated. But it is also exciting, satisfying, soothing, peaceful, and mindful.

I am deeply influenced by my Middle Eastern culture and enjoy exploring various traditional and contemporary techniques. Clay is one of the most ancient materials, I love working with it and the unpredictable outcome of Raku is exhilarating. I enjoy freedom to represent my unseen spirit and the instantaneous inspirations that clay facilitates.

Clay is my passion and pottery is my sacred world which speaks a universal language of wonder and beauty.  

Trish O’Sullivan

Finding the Light

My paintings are inspired by our Canadian landscape, how the light plays across the water, or highlights a tree. I try to express how it makes me feel through my paintings. My feelings towards my surroundings are always changing and evolving and is represented in my more current works. I feel at peace in nature, in its movement and its stillness. My intent is to capture that feeling in my paintings as well as to inspire viewers to slow down and see the beauty around them.

Désirée Penner

Cabin’s Last Night

These paintings are especially cherished, as this was the first collection of paintings I completed after graduating with my Bachelor of Social Work in 2018.  These pieces are representative of the internal turmoil that I experienced, as I stepped out of the classroom with optimism and was confronted first-hand with the realities of structural oppression in our society.  Lessons no longer lived within the confines of textbooks and sample scenarios.  The work was sometimes heavy.  You will notice that many of the paintings contain an aspect of darkness that lingers in the night skies and long shadows of the forest.  However, there is purposefully always a source of light painted into each image, whether in a porch light or aurora borealis overhead.  The act of pivoting to search for that light is one of humanity’s most powerful coping mechanisms.