SANDRA HARRIS

Painting the Spirit of the Canadian Landscape

In my own words...

I wake up in the morning and I am excited to paint. I feel fortunate to know what my passion is and to be able to pursue it.

My paintings are about striking a strong emotional cord. I want anyone looking at them to feel excited and to enjoy what they're looking at!

To paint the landscapes I live in and alongside feels authentic to me and how I choose to see the world. Natural places are endangered. And while I paint these places because I find them to be lovely, it is also in an effort to preserve the essence of their presence in a way that a historical record cannot.

My ultimate goal is to try to leave this world a little better off than how I found it. No painting can ever do justice to how beautiful and utterly alive with the magic of Life that these wild places thankfully still are, so hopefully I/we can help keep them that way for the next generation to come and pass them the baton. :-)

Artist Statement:

My inspiration is the untamed Canadian landscape, but my passion in painting is to communicate the excitement that it evokes within me. I am always searching for a scene that is already art, so when I find it, I feel like the moth in front of the flame. The beauty of it captivates me because I have found Nature that is in harmony with the nature within me.

The goal of my work is to recreate or relate the experience of seeing and being in these landscapes to the viewer, and to hopefully awaken in one’s conscious mind a sense of wonder in the face of a beauty that hints towards something bigger than the human dimension.