Barbara Ursel

Barbara is an award-winning full time artist based in Ottawa, Ontario.  Her paintings are in public, corporate and individual collections in Canada and internationally.

Barbara excels at painting urban landscapes:  the streetscapes and people she sees all around her.  She paints the light, and the shadows it casts, in these ordinary scenes to show the wonders that she sees there.  The light and the shadows, the street signs, the people, and even the buildings themselves are constantly changing, and the wonders that caught Barbara’s eye when she painted them won’t always be around.  Barbara hopes that viewers of her paintings will be able to share and explore these “ordinary wonders” and muse about the people and places on her canvases or, even better, let the paintings reconnect them with memories of their own.  That’s why she paints.

Barbara works in acrylics and alternates layers of opaque and transparent paint to build up values and complex colours on the canvas, repeating this process dozens of times in a single painting to capture the glowing light and the shadow it casts.