Tag: contemporary oil painting
Erin Bell creates oil paintings inspired by the mountains, forests, lakes, open skies, and changing weather she has experienced while living and travelling across Canada. Her relationship with landscape is deeply personal, shaped by years of moving, searching for belonging, and finding moments of quiet and clarity in nature. After returning to painting more seriously during a difficult period in her life, Erin began using the easel as a place to slow down and reconnect with what she was feeling. Working primarily in oils, she uses brushes and palette knives to…
For more than two decades, Gala Gilan has developed a contemporary figurative painting practice that combines technical realism with emotional depth, quiet atmosphere, and thoughtful observation. Working primarily in oil, she uses light not simply to define form but to shape mood, memory, and the subtle emotional presence within each portrait. Rather than creating exact likenesses, Gala's paintings leave space for mystery, inviting viewers to bring their own experiences and interpretations into every work. Inspired by everyday moments, personal relationships, and the enduring language of realism, she explores how portraiture can…
Katharine Dufault creates atmospheric landscape paintings that weave together observation, memory, and imagination to create places that feel emotionally familiar rather than geographically exact. Raised in the countryside near Cambridge, England, she developed a lifelong relationship with nature through countless afternoons spent painting outdoors with her artist mother, experiences that continue to shape her creative practice today. Working primarily in oil while also exploring watercolour, encaustic, monotype, and printmaking, Katharine begins with real landscapes before allowing intuition and memory to transform them into something entirely new. Trees, forests, rivers, rolling meadows,…
Robyn Palescandolo creates floral paintings that balance painterly realism with expressive brushwork, transforming flowers, fruit, and natural forms into deeply emotional experiences of beauty, wonder, and connection. Drawing inspiration from years spent studying art history, working as a designer, running a painting retreat in rural Italy, and continually returning to art throughout life's many changes, her work reflects both technical mastery and personal growth. Rich with soft pinks, lavenders, blues, greens, and luminous whites, her palette emerges from close observation of nature while gently heightening colour to capture emotion rather than…
Victoria Curling Eriksson creates atmospheric oil paintings that move between seascape, landscape, and emotional memory, transforming coastlines, skies, forests, and shifting light into deeply calming visual experiences. Living on the northwest coast of Skåne in Sweden, surrounded by sea and woodland nature reserves, she paints entirely from intuition rather than photographs or sketches, allowing colour, atmosphere, and feeling to guide each work as it slowly develops through layered oils. Her paintings often begin with only an emotion or palette in mind, gradually evolving over many thin layers into compositions filled with…
Valeria Ocean creates luminous oil paintings that transform waves, reflections, and shifting light into emotional landscapes suspended between realism and abstraction. Rooted in childhood memories of annual trips to the Black Sea, her connection to water became less about depicting a place and more about expressing inner emotional states through movement, atmosphere, and texture. Working with a deliberately limited palette, often just four or five tubes of paint, she builds meditative surfaces where subtle shifts in light and color carry a remarkable sense of depth and calm. Rather than painting wide…
Pencil drawing asks for patience, focus, and a steady hand. In this feature, we look closely at five contemporary pencil artists who use graphite and coloured pencil to create work that rewards slow looking. From quiet portrait studies to carefully observed figures and animals, these artists show how much can be achieved with restraint, discipline, and long-term dedication to a single medium.
Five women. Five different paths. One shared way of working through careful looking and steady practice. This feature follows Stephanie Birdsall, Amy Verhoeff, Lori Putnam, Robin Cheers, and Carolyn Lindsey as they move between studio and outdoor painting, teaching and exhibiting, and the everyday routines that shape their work.