Artist
For Seonaid, painting has opened up the world ... She has studied privately in Italy, France, Hawaii and Toronto, but is largely self-taught. While evocative of European and Canadian impressionists, Seonaid’s paintings are decidedly her own. Her paintings are in private and corporate collections.
For almost fifteen years, Seonaid taught children with special needs and channeled her love of art into creative ways of teaching math and science, literature and history. A back injury in 2000 followed by surgery and a long recovery, meant that she could not return to the classroom. She decided to pursue her childhood passion for making art full-time, and since then has lived to paint.
Seonaid’s paintings take iconic images - cypresses, field stone, wild flowers - and infuse them with new life. Although people are often absent, there is a profound sense of relationship between people and place. The scene draws you in, and invites you to see the familiar in startling new ways.
Fragments of conversation float through the air at her shows - people searching for the words that match the feelings evoked by her images: the juxtaposition of old and new -a dirt road winding through a violet Tuscan sky, cypresses so dark a green they’re almost black, reaching up, ancient, stalwart, mindless of their staggering beauty; a verdant rain forest in British Columbia, a sea bird riding a thermal, rocks and tide pools shimmering like stars; delicate white ground cover of spring, an ancient stone wall (is that the imprint of the hand that placed it there?) worn by centuries of weather; a riot of poppies and wild irises at the foot of a twisted tree trunk. People are still and excited and speak of feeling as if they could enter the picture, walk up to the big old wood door in the middle distance to find something waiting for them.