Cecilia Johnstone

In the Alex Fong Galleria

Water As Life

Artist Statement

These paintings were completed over the last four years through a period of enormous personal change and loss. This sense of change and movement is reflected in the themes of water and light running through the work. Each painting is a meditation on the relative permanence of the physical world as well as the fleeting brilliance and beauty of an individual life. 

Standing on a shoreline, one can feel the millennia that the earth has withstood. In the ever-changing water, one feels the restless impermanence of the individual human experience. Rainy nights evoke that same transience - nature rushing through the sparkling cities that we have built up as people hurry from place to place. Finally, with the individual scale of the portrait, one attempts to capture a person's essential character within a single passing moment.

Artist Biography

I began my artist life conventionally, as a child sketching birds and flowers. At age twelve my father brought me to an adult self-directed studio class one evening each week; an artist himself, he understood that to become a painter, more vital than learning technique is developing one’s self-expression. My paintings today emerged unexpectedly from a night class I took at Emily Carr University for comic books. I had never been introduced to pen and ink before, and that experience of dipping and scratching the pen over Bristol paper is how I found my line. I use that same stroke in my paintings - always one brush size, the smallest available, dipping into solid unblended colours and then straight onto the canvas to be mixed in place.