Time to Get Loud

Artist Sheila Kernan specializes in manifesting her lively and energetic enthusiasm for life through highly playful and mesmerizing paintings.

Sheila Kernan (BFA ’06, Painting) employs a proficiency in watercolour, oil and acrylics to produce multi-layered, greatly texturized paintings that reflect the electric excitement of a downtown night and the intense beauty of Alberta’s mountainous landscape. The artist skillfully creates dimensions of light and dense paint alongside an unexpected use of pattern and surface to generate the illusion of depth and foreground. The combination and contrast of liquid and more grounded elements of Kernan’s pieces elevate the work from pictorial tableaus of everyday scenes to convincing visions of a glimpse inside the artist’s inventive ode to her much-admired surroundings. Kernan whimsically reveals a crossover of stories documenting the environment and imagination at play using a vibrant colour palette and thick, impasto brush strokes. Viewers are drawn into a conversation with paint, written into a fluid chronicle of the artist’s experience of the world and artistic conceptions.