Semi-finalist 2025
| Submitted by: | Jill Thomson |
| Department: | Human Ecology |
| Faculty: | Agricultural, Life + Environmental Sciences |
This research painting represents spatial interior and exterior relationships of material culture within the dense confines of cities in North America and ancestral Holland. It is a personal remembering and observing of unexpected entanglements among buildings and wild spaces, kitchens and gardens, sitting rooms and forests, where vibrant cities with the familiar vernacular of neighbourhood architecture and public space are travelled on multiple planes. Paths are created by people walking around homes, front yards and gardens and by cycling past local shops and green spaces. The complex interconnectivity among humans, things and the natural world are rendered intuitively through washes, drip marks, and brush strokes. Memories of material relationships—riding and discovering balance on a Dutch-styled bike and helping my children to bike—are a ‘coming home’ to ancestral landscapes that give structure to the painting. Material things created by humans transcend time through memory and overlay places and spaces to create a sense of belonging. The painting’s pathways afford renewed connections to cities, bring spaces alive, and provide people with agency, balance and possibility.
Was your image created using Generative AI?
No.
How was your image created?
The image of this painting was photographed in my home studio. The painting was created in acrylic paint on a 40 x 60” canvas in my studio using large and small brushes, rags, sticks, water and mediums.The painting began with a series of washes, poured onto the canvas. The canvas was tilted at different angles to create drips in different directions. Colour was splashed into these initial washes while the canvas was still wet so that it bled into the existing wash. Once dry, the painting was set on an easel and painted using source material photographed in cities, images of friends and family and figures captured in different environments. Many images came from a recent trip to Holland, the Edmonton Urban Farm, community gardens and my own garden. The frontal figure with a bike, was photographed in Amsterdam along with many images of cyclists for a current series of Bicycle Infrastructure paintings which are becoming part of an extensive series of Urban Garden paintings. The paint was applied in an expressive intuitive style, sometimes turning the canvas upside down and sideways to view the colour and composition without reference to representational images.
Where is the image located?
This image was created within my home studio on the main floor of our house where I work and have held open studios over the past twenty years in my career as a visual artist. The house is surrounded by a front and backyard garden with raised beds that serve are observed and studied as content for my paintings.