GRETA GUZEK, January, 2012, West End Gallery, Victoria

West End Gallery, Victoria

January, 2012

By Janet Nicol

Greta Guzek is originally from South Africa, and has been living on BC’s Sunshine Coast for three decades now — she says her surroundings have penetrated her being. “I’m lucky to be surrounded by this mesmerizing beauty. Everywhere I look is a painting.” She’s intrigued with capturing the spaces where land meets water. “I consider my paintings ‘coastscapes,’” she says. Among her colourful and rhythmic acrylic canvases, are depictions of arbutus trees. “The arbutus symbolizes the essence of the West Coast,” she says. “The trees thrive on warm, sunny western slopes and have become typical of this place.” Guzek has worked previously with silkscreening and printmaking, but when she moved to painting several years ago, she found the process freeing. “I imbue lots of my emotion in colour and the brush stroke. All of my subject matter is metaphor,” she says. “I reveal the deeper elements of things in trees or cottages or driftwood on the beach, or in the seasons.” Guzek says the passion to create never changes for her, as her work evolves. “I could paint the same tree through the seasons a thousand different ways. The elements in nature are inexhaustible.” Guzek’s work will be part of a 12-artist group show at West End Gallery in Victoria in January.