By Marica Villeneuve
My art expresses my desire to be closer to nature, while also being in awe of the incredible things that humans have created. Having spent most of my life traveling back and forth between rural Northern and urban Southern Ontario, living in both Toronto and North Bay at different points in my life, I often like to combine animals and nature with cities or man-made settings in my art, to bridge the gap between humans and nature.
In a society where we tend to feel like we are separate from nature, I want to highlight nature’s immense beauty and the fact that we are very much a part of it as well, to hopefully encourage a more harmonious existence with it. I get a lot of inspiration from my dreams and daydreams and my goal is to make the impossible look possible by combining realism and surrealism, to immerse the viewer in a fantastical scene.
Having worked as a custom framer and an art consultant, my experience in the art and interior design industries deepened my interest in colour and design, and sparked a huge love for frames, which I now like to include as part of some of my original works of art and offer with some of my fine art prints. In a lot of my recent artwork, I have been trying to highlight the beauty of nature by focusing on the incredible colours that can be found in real plants and animals.
I mainly work in multiple, very thin layers of acrylic paint to create a flat texture and matte finish because I want viewers to focus more on the image than on the paint used to create it. Working on little details is my favourite part of the process and I love seeing peoples’ reactions when they notice them. My favourite type of comment from my art and print collectors is that looking at my art is like looking through a window into a wondrous scene that brightens their day and makes them feel more at peace.
I’m so deeply touched that my art has the ability to affect people in such a meaningful way, and I thank every one of my collectors for their amazing support of my life-long love of artmaking!
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