Artist Biographies

Cheryl Fortier

Painting professionally for more than 15 years, British Columbia artist Cheryl Fortier's acrylic landscapes and florals hang in collections around North America. Evolving from a representational background, her recent works are more impressionistic and emotional, and draw heavily from her extensive travels on the B.C. coast. Some of the pieces are large in scale and allow the viewer to be completely immersed in the experience.

Artist Statement: The ephemeral beauty of the landscape and the lingering presence of the garden draw me from the sheer physicality of the world to the possibility of its transformation through art.

I now spend the greater part of my life in an urban environment, where I pass my time longing to be in and subsequently trying to evoke a 'sense' of the places in nature that have stirred me. The kind of sense that I want to summon is both physical, in that the paintings recall the actual places I have been, and more importantly, it is emotive, evoking a deeper resonance with the sensations of calm I experience in nature's presence.

This nature/culture split, this dichotomy between the machinery of urban life and calming presence of the land, is a division that helps me bring the poetry of the land into sharper focus. My attention is similarly divided between searching for a quality of experience in nature that is worth translating into art, and then physically rendering this experience as a painting. This transformation takes place in my studio, situated in a dense industrial sector, where the din of heavy traffic recedes in the face of my memories and purposeful reverie. The physical act of painting allows me to exist in both nature and culture and to move freely between them.

View artworks by Cheryl Fortier »

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