Surface & Structure: Jessamyn Box & Verne Busby

Surface & Structure brings together new work by Verne Busby and Jessamyn Box, two painters whose practices explore the balance between composition, restraint, and material presence.

While Busby approaches painting through landscape and atmosphere, and Box through abstraction and surface, both artists share a disciplined sensitivity to structure, light, and spatial rhythm. Their work reflects a considered engagement with paint as both medium and subject — where gesture is measured and composition carefully held.

Together, the exhibition highlights painting as a field of quiet tension and clarity, inviting viewers to experience how surface, colour, and structure shape the visual and emotional impact of a work.

This show is about how two painters use structure and restraint differently — one through landscape, one through abstraction — but both through a strong sensitivity to surface and composition.

Jessamyn Box uses acrylic paint, marker, crayon, charcoal, ink and spray paint to create large, abstract works of art that are grounded in colour and explore the relationship and territory between objects and form.

Her work is a multifarious, dynamic fairy tale that forces the journey’s plot and resolution into the eye of the viewer.  

Robust brush strokes and soft lines create harmony through discord - a theme reflective of the natural contrasts found in the subject matter Busby’s work continues to celebrate. Bringing to life the abstract glory of the change of seasons, the artist’s work focuses on shifting daylight and the movement of the eye. Drawing viewers into a world of landscape and memories, Busby skillfully employs a use of daring perspective and depth while capturing the prismatic colour palette of autumn leaves, fields from above and nature in all its temperate splendour.

Verne Busby’s work presents a narrative on the unencumbered beauty of Alberta’s countryside through the use of sweeping line and form and multi layered harmonic hues.