Category: Featured Artists

August 1, 2023 Steph Allesia No comments exist

About Face: a study of moods, personalities There’s two meanings to the phrase, About Face, and both apply to Art Carlyle’s aptly named Featured Artist Show on display at the Rainforest Arts Gallery for August and September. One take is: A change in direction. Another is: To do with the human visage. A professional photographer…

March 30, 2023 Craig Spence

Big, Bold, Beautiful! Those are just some of the adjectives that describe Elissa Anthony’s Up Close and Personal exhibit on display at the Rainforest Arts gallery in April and May. This show focuses on her paintings of flowers. But don’t expect classical arrangements in vases and tidy English gardens. Anthony’s portraits explode out of their canvases, landscapes…

July 22, 2022 Craig Spence

When we’re not complaining about them, we most often take seagulls for granted, but photographer-artist Cim MacDonald wants to show people a more romantic side of their natures. Photographer and artist Cim MacDonald never imagined how fascinating and inspiring a study of seagulls would be the day she pulled on her black ‘Walmart boots’, grabbed…

June 13, 2022 Craig Spence

“The joy of it is simply pulling it off the press,” Mary Ann Gerwing said when asked why she chose printmaking as an art form. “It’s the great reveal.” What she means is you never know exactly what’s going to emerge in the transition from artist’s vision, to plate or stencil, to print on paper….

January 1, 2022 Craig Spence

 Artist Jack Duckworth: “I love the West Coast scenes. Those are the ones I stick to…” ‘Our Island’ the subject of Jack Duckworth’s art For Artist Jack Duckworth life has come full circle. He grew up in Duncan, and as a youth took up art and music, but put his brushes aside for ‘an extended…

February 28, 2019 Craig Spence No comments exist

American philosopher and naturist Ralph Waldo Emerson eulogized weeds as plants ‘whose virtues have not been discovered. It’s in that spirit that Artist Diana Durrand portrays the common dandelion (Taraxacum Officinale), using bold paintings, delicate drawings and elegant sculptures, all intended to override our entrenched suburban bias against this much maligned species. Her tribute, 100…

July 5, 2018 Craig Spence 2 comments

Raising a chuckle takes skill and hard work Sally Mann, whose work is featured at Rainforest Arts for the months of July and August, wants people to ‘have a chuckle’ viewing her art. That, as it turns out, is serious business. “My work doesn’t have to have a message,” she said. “If it makes somebody…

May 28, 2018 Craig Spence No comments exist

Chemainus sculptor, artist, writer, Bernice Ramsdin-Firth, at 84, has been shaped by the experiences of a rich and varied life, and she’s still looking for media and techniques to express how that feels and what it means. She, and her husband Gord, live in what can best be described as a comfortable ‘West Coast Californian’ style home…