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Carylann Loeppky is a fine art painter. Her compelling portraits and figurative paintings focus on the feminine form, charm and illusions.

Inspired by 17th century french court painters and 20th century french surrealists, Loeppky draws on classical techniques to bring the canvas to life. Her figures haunt you with their gaze, please you with their poses and bewilder you with their secrets. They call to your spirit: spellbound ballerinas, gone girls and decadent queens living on the edge of night, or is it a country lake?

What is their story? They make you want to know.

Loeppky’s past exhibitions include solo shows in Montreal, New York, and Los Angeles, as well as exhibits in Croatia and London, England. As Juno award-nominated graphic designer, she’s produced album art for Nettwerk label artists Delerium, Front Line Assembly, and Skinny Puppy among others. Carylann lives and works in Vancouver, B.C.

https://carylann.format.com

There is a common perception that if art includes humour, it somehow robs the work of its substance. Coralie’s take is that art should evoke emotion and if that emotion involves having a good belly laugh, then the work is a success.

Coralie paints the things that amuse and intrigue her; ordinary things that people look at every day, but seldom really see. All of her subject matter bears the indelible mark of humanity, warts and all.

She sculpts the kind of characters that you’re likely to meet on the street. They are the faces of people that you swear you’ve met somewhere before and the histories of their lives are etched in their expressions.

Coralie, who grew up in New Zealand, now makes her home in Gibsons Landing, British Columbia.

https://coralieswaney.com

ARTIST STATEMENT

Letters, numbers and images are used to visually communicate a thought or idea – arranged into a specific order so that others are able to “decode” the message. In my work I use letters, numbers and images in non-traditional ways and incorporate color, lines and various mixed media elements to build structure and draw out themes and ideas that connect us to past experiences or memories. The goal is not only to showcase the beauty inherent in the elements themselves, but also to engage both the logical side of the brain, which wants to decode the message and the creative side, which desires to find its own unique experience.

BIOGRAPHY

Michael Soltis is an American/Canadian visual artist and home designer/builder. He has a Masters degree in Education, has worked in the business and non-profit sector as a high level manager, and was a film and television actor for several years. His passion has always been the arts and his work has been shown in several galleries throughout North America and been featured in Canadian House & Home, HGTV.ca, Anthology Magazine, The Artist Catalogue, the Vancouver TED Conference, Comic Con in Vancouver as well as several contemporary art blogs and articles. He is the recipient of awards from both the Society of Canadian Artists and the Canadian Federation of Artists and his paintings are held in corporate and private collections throughout the United States, Canada and Europe.

https://www.soltisart.com

Ronan Boyle was born in Derry, Northern Ireland and came to Canada as a child in 1974. Drawing, painting and sculpting since childhood, he is a self-taught artist; his main inspirations stem from the Pop movement of the ’60s and the Do-It-Yourself movement of New York’s punk scene in the late ’70s and early ’80s.  His work has an edgy street aesthetic with a clean sophistication.

Ronan currently lives and paints in Vancouver.

Each piece in Mycroft’s body of work chronicles a search for equilibrium. Her striving to balance value, composition, and colour achieves the depth and richness of her paintings: their sense of harmony.

Mycroft begins with a colour palette that is both crafted and intuited. She selects and mixes it with precision, though its tones are collected through a largely subconsious reading of our environment. She immerses herself in the water-saturated colours of the Pacific Northwest’s coastal trees, fields, rocks and ocean, which form her palette. However, it is not their literal forms but their chromatic features and refractions of light that lend her work its distinct abstraction and movement. Memories of place form a starting point, but Mycroft is committed to an abstraction that allows expression of forms, tones, and hues in themselves. Bands of colour converge, as her play with different levels of transparencies achieves the illusion of depth and hue revealing new tones in their unification.

 Mycroft’s process is based in the concept of flux. While we commonly use this word as ‘change’, its literal meaning is ‘flow’. After establishing her colour field, Mycroft pours water-thinned acrylic paint onto clear primed raw canvas, creating stains of varying opacities. This is the moment where the nature of the medium literally merges with the artist’s practice; Mycroft must at once respond to and guide the flow of the water onto the canvas. Lifting, tilting, asserting, and yielding all fill the brief space between the water’s contact and its settling. While the throughline of Mycroft’s works reflects the consistency of her process, the viscosity and volume of diluted paint are unique each time, calling the artist to respond with immediacy to the unexpected dynamics at play across the canvas.

The effects of Mycroft’s unique approach re-enact the play of light and colour evident throughout our living surroundings. Washes of overlapping transparencies and intersections of colour create new and exciting hues. There are pops of opacity and unexpected colours vividly reminiscent of those we see in the flux of water through our oceans and rivers. The intersections and disruptions of colour along the canvas are kindred to those along our coast.