Overview

Artist Sheila Kernan specializes in manifesting her lively and energetic enthusiasm for life through highly playful and mesmerizing paintings.

Kernan employs a proficiency in watercolour, oil and acrylics to produce multi layered, greatly texturized paintings that reflect the electric excitement of a downtown night and the intense beauty of Alberta’s mountainous landscape. The artist skillfully creates dimensions of light and dense paint alongside an unexpected use of pattern and surface to generate the illusion of depth and foreground. The combination and contrast of liquid and more grounded elements of Kernan’s pieces elevate the work from pictorial tableaus of everyday scenes to convincing visions of a glimpse inside the artist’s inventive ode to her much-admired surroundings. Utilizing a vibrant colour palette and thick, impasto brush strokes, Kernan whimsically reveals a crossover of stories documenting the environment and imagination at play. Viewers are drawn into a conversation with paint; written into a fluid chronicle of the artist’s experience of the world and artistic conceptions.

Works
Video
Biography

Sheila KernanExperiencing the world has become an integral part of Sheila Kernan's art making process. She finds beauty in large urban centers as well as on remote mountain tops and is mesmerized by the energy and excitement of translating an experience onto canvas. She says that nothing is better than paint gliding across the canvas as a multitude of patterns and reflections form from the paint squishing, oozing and blending together - the surface becomes filled with thick impasto marks, brilliant colours, and flat shapes that fuse and meld together to create conversations.

 

Sheila’s fascination with bright lights of the cityscape and golden hues of the Canadian prairie, and remarkable ability to paint them into something immensely more intense and alive than seen by the naked eye, has led collectors and curators alike to deem her “the one to watch”.

Exhibitions