Spotlight On: The Urban Landscape
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or in this case, the artist.
Here we present to you a collection of our artists whose work embodies everything that is glorious and exciting about life in the city. These works are really a testament that there is light, colour, shape and texture to be found in even the most unexpected of places; even in the seemingly mundane streets and structures that surround us everyday. You just need to learn how to see it. Enjoy.
Barbara Ursel
It’s funny … I live next to the Ottawa River and love walking along its banks and enjoying the natural landscape. But, when it comes to painting, I choose urban landscapes over natural landscapes every time.
Urban landscapes excite me because they are alive. Sometimes with people; other times with cars, bikes, buildings, street signs or advertising. It might be a bit of a “Rear Window” voyeuristic thing but who doesn’t like watching lives unfold and speculating about people and places?
My urban landscapes start with photo shoots. I can easily take 900 photos during a day’s photo excursion (which might yield material for only a couple of paintings). Once I’m back in the studio I start experimenting. I paint and draw with my Apple pencil and two photo editing software tools and focus on light and shadow and all the elements of composition to come up with a plan for the painting. Often this plan is radically differ from my photo references and it’s almost always much simpler. I have a pretty intuitive feel for what will make a good painting. When I move to the canvas I always do a tonal underpainting first without colour so I can focus only on values — the lights and the darks. It’s an exciting process to create an urban landscape.
explore Barbara’s work
Susan Gale
Antony Ellis
I was born in the city of Birmingham, England. And for thirty years I’ve lived in Toronto. Both are big urban settings. I do tend to focus a lot on street art and graffiti. The main reason being graffiti sometimes doesn’t stay around for long. So you have to grab it before it’s gone.
Also for candid photography I like the diversity of people and cultures that are found in large cities. Urban areas provide an ever changing canvas for my art.
Ivano Stocco
For me my interest in the urban landscape has something to do with people and the structures we throw up around ourselves, choose to live in, and why. I love the busyness of the city, the human contact, and the cultural offering. The popular architecture - the laneways, garages, mom-and-pop storefronts, underpasses, etc. - really get me going, not just because of how they look but what they say in a bigger anthropological sense. Then the combination of natural and artificial colours, the abstracted forms, and the light, passing through tall buildings, refracting in shiny surfaces, or lighting up dark streets in neon always grab my attention in a purely aesthetic way. While the city can be draining, for sure, it tends more often to fill me with projects and ideas.
I guess I started painting urban landscapes back in the days because I wanted to do something different, something that had a contemporary edge to it and was not the Group of Seven (though of course those were the very first kinds of paintings I sold, and I admire those artists). I also wanted the challenge of taking all of the city's complexity and simplifying, or maybe synthesizing, it.
One of the activities I've always enjoyed is painting on a street corner, even just partially, because it's so fully sensorial and the experience sinks deep into memory. Later on, pulling out a piece done like this resurfaces feelings like nothing else.
Ben Mark Holzberg
Sherri Rogers
I like to paint urban graffiti in a landscape to show the beauty that artists have contributed to the environment. The artists bring colour to dark neighborhoods and make common spaces more inviting to everyone, and creates a beautiful snapshot for a painting. I also like to explore the legacy of vehicles in the city- whether we move by foot, bike or truck, street art forces the viewer to interact in intentional ways and at different speeds.
Rebecca Ott
I have always been drawn to the understated ubiquity of the urban landscape. The occluding forms of buildings and infrastructure create interesting patterns and shapes of colour, light and shadow. I feel an familiar affinity to the city where I live and I aim to capture a moment of mutual presence.
Taralee Guild
Tate Sameshima
Sherry Czekus
In terms of the urban landscape, I'm interested in the way public spaces provide a common place for the urban crowd to gather and shape social interactions through its design.
Ian Varney
Chris Albert
The urban landscape, just full of motion, vibrancy and so many unexpected angles, that’s why I love shooting the URB, a surprise is around the corner
Eryn O’Neill
My interest in Urban Landscape comes from being a runner. I use that as my main method to collect imagery used for paintings. I spend time observing the unremarkable details that are in place for functionality as the main priority. The areas I deem worthy to paint come from years of careful observation and editing in my studio to create confident and narrative pieces that resonate with a broader audience. I aim to make relatable work, and to continue to lower the barrier where art, architecture and urban advancement intersect.
Brian Harvey
I find the city to be an endlessly interesting and dynamic subject. I live and work in Toronto so my paintings are also studies of my everyday observations wandering through different neighbourhoods, always trying to pay attention to the typically mundane facets of the city. I am interested in the fleeting moments or urban life, and the overlooked and aging corners of Toronto that express a sense of time and place shaped by layers of urban transformation.
Jacquelyn Sloane Siklos
It’s often hard to put words to why I am drawn to certain subjects. If I try to put my intuitive reaction into words, the urban environment has always beckoned. I love the stacked shapes and rhythmic patterns, the subtle changing colours and the vibrancy of light. I often find my images from a higher vantage point - a hotel window, a train, a car. It suppose it feels like I’m safely removed from the daily blast of life and I can sit and contemplate. It’s almost a form of meditation - to look through a lens at the world beyond. I love looking for the small intimate details that feel like an expression of our universal shared experience of life - a glimpse of a light through a window, a tiny person making their way home, the light of a car, the intimacy of laundry hung out to dry, which lead me to empathy for all the unseen stories of daily life.
Nancy De Boni
Randy Hryrhorczuk
There is quiet beauty in unremarkable, overlooked structures found in urban landscapes. Nostalgia drives my attempt to capture fleeting memory associated with place, through the exercise of painting.
George Pavlasek
Gordon Leverton
I paint the environment I live in. I’m drawn to the lines and the construction of urban architecture, presenting my work from several different perspectives.
I became fascinated by the inner networks and webs of the city and my latent love of art and design soon emerged, this inspired me to capture these emotions on canvas.
Megan D’Arcy
The urban landscape. It’s a very broad subject matter which is one of reasons that I love it. There are so many lines and patterns and different perspectives to play around with.
