This Land is Our Land: Rotating Featured Works from Gallery Artists

Celebrated Canadian landscape artist Holly Dyrland specializes in a pictorial love affair with the natural beauty of Alberta’s rural and alpine regions with vibrant, breathtakingly orchestrated views of the prairies, back country roads, mountain lakes and sprawling cerulean skies.

Joel Mara uses his connection to raw nature to create soothing, participatory experiences of art, countryside, and colour. Drawn to the drama and immediacy of nature, Mara effectively creates images emanating a deep air of wistfulness and nostalgia as if being observed through a snow-coated window or a vintage film reel. Simplifying his work as much as he dares, Mara paints in small, micro brushstrokes of gentle, naturalistic colour creating highly pixelated works which viewed close up provide a multitude of quick, intricate details but viewed from afar present a sweeping vision of evocative landscapes.

Richard Cole elegantly captures the essence of ephemeral sunbeams and the unexpected beauty of landscape behind an incandescent film of dappled light. Masterfully recreating the flare of a lens or a brilliant flash before one's eyes, the artist's work pays tribute to dancing rays in such a way as to evoke an emotional response akin to being in the physical presence of nature. Cole presents viewers with a tangible frozen moment of time, honouring the minutest of moments and the inherent magnificence of a multitude of landscapes, oceanscapes, and countrysides.

Ian Sheldon leverages his diversity of medium and subject with a passion for geographical exploration to create ethereal, wide horizon and big sky paintings that explore a deeper sense of place and colour. Sheldon's work consistently embraces the natural rolling undertones of emotional response in direct correlation to the inherent nature of weather. Like the storms he chases, Sheldon’s moody and captivatingly beautiful work is a mesmerizing interplay between light and dark, calm and chaos. Masterfully capturing the breakthrough light and solemnity of a storm, Sheldon combines vibrant landscapes with intensely shadowed skylines, allowing viewers to react and interpret the work in their own way.