Penelope Scott-McCaig | Faraway Close

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Penelope Scott-McCaig, “Faraway Close,” 2024

(courtesy of the Artist)

Opening reception: Friday April 26, 2024 | 6-8pm

Penelope Scott-McCaig is a Victoria/Gabriola based artist. She has made her home on Vancouver Island for many years. She is best known for her Botanicals and Landscapes. She works in light washes of acrylic layer upon layer creating ethereal narratives of place and memory. Her work is always tied closely to the land. This show is focused largely on her landscapes and each one is a view to a place she gazed at on land or water. They speak of the fantastical places up and down the Georgia Straight, especially around the Southern Gulf Islands that are best discovered on a boat.

The pieces reveal new approaches and views in her work as she moves into a new chapter of her artistic journey. This show is a beauty one and will lure you into the quiet yet evocative scenes. As you lean into the pieces fragment by fragment they will reveal more and more of her process of removing and creating space. Capturing the West Coast mood so perfectly with the cool damp feeling and nuanced palettes of greens and blues.

Penelope earned a BFA in Visual Arts with distinction, from the University of Victoria, British Columbia. Her work can be found in numerous private collections across Canada, the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia and the Caribbean.

"This group of paintings is inspired by deeply heartfelt and intensely poignant life experiences and my passionate and remembered feelings therein.

My love of the natural environment, particularly the British Columbian coast, has been highly focused in recent years by the countless local maritime adventures I have been fortunate enough to take. Each landscape and plant is painted from a photograph that I have taken from a place that I have visited.

I am drawn to the delicate and ever-changing beauty of this landscape and the depth of mystery, power and spirituality that can exist there. This sense of awe, married with my own emotional attachment to each place informs the rendering of the paintings. The work unfolds intuitively as I use form, colour, and a strong evidence of process to reveal the beauty I see but also to represent a mood felt in a certain place in time.

These paintings are a meditation on memory, on love, on loss, on joy, on freedom and on innocence. And so in some way each piece becomes a self portrait; a mapping of an emotional history; an ode to the feeling of being alive."

- Penelope Scott-McCaig