Travels on Canvas With Seonaid Ross

Seonaid Ross

For Canadian artist Seonaid Ross, the creation of her colorful expressionistic landscapes is a journey of personal discovery. Inspired by both European and Canadian Impressionist works, Ross creates brilliantly colorful, lively depictions of familiar places, rich with light, texture, and form. Her masterful use of the brushstroke lends a strong sense of movement to each piece, evoking the full experience of place for the viewer. Through her art, Ross is able to re-create her vivid experience, so that her "subjects move through memory to the canvas by the way of the heart." In Ross's paintings, iconic images such as cypresses, gondolas, cityscapes and wildflowers are infused with new life, reflecting layers of emotive expression and meaning. Colors, textures and compositions are juxtaposed in unexpected ways, resulting in terrains that while familiar are simultaneous otherworldly, where the viewer comes to expect the unexpected and find new meanings in recognizable forms. Although Ross focuses mainly on landscape in her paintings, even in their absence people play a profound role in the overall tableau. Within each image is embedded a strong sense of relationship between people and place, as the viewer is invited not only to experience the artist's relationship with the land and cityscapes but to cultivate their own connection to the subject matter as well. For Ross, painting involves all the senses, and this multisensory focus comes through in her work. Indeed the viewer is immediately pulled into a deep sense of place, where one can feel the breeze, hear the gentle lap of water, smell the flowers, and absorb the heat of the sun. As Ross explains, "every painting tells a story about the wonders of nature, the gifts of mankind throughout the ages, the slower rhythms of life and the moments frozen in time. The experience of developing a landscape is one of joy, delight, learning and freedom." Seonaid’s paintings have been sold Internationally, in Canada and are in both private and corporate Collections.