Natasha Miller, Alanna Sparanese, Raymond Sapergia and Kylee Turunen: September Featured Artists

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Natasha Miller, "Somewhere between Hopes and Dreams," 2021

mixed media painting, 24" X 48" X 2"

Natasha Miller

Natasha Miller is a self-taught artist who was born and raised on Vancouver Island and travelled by boat to the East coast where she currently lives and paints on a tiny lobster fishing island in the Bay of Fundy. Natasha has invented her own painting technique where she creates seascapes and landscapes using homemade maple charcoal from her Italian wood fired pizza oven, soot, ash and acrylic paint used for the bold silhouettes and pops of colours. Most paintings consist of 60-100 layers of medium and sealers and take almost a month to complete. She has always drawn inspiration from quiet moments and the silhouettes all around- especially trees and rugged coastlines, the sea and its boats, birds and beaches and her current work reflects this. 

Natasha's work is highly collectable and represented in over a dozen commercial galleries in North America and Europe.

Kylee Turunen

Kylee is a Canadian artist, born and raised in Ontario and currently living in Port Alberni, British Columbia. She shows her work in a number of galleries around Vancouver Island. Growing up with the constant exposure to her artist father, she picked up an appreciation and excitement for creating art. She completed the Fine Art program at Toronto's Centennial College in 2009. Since then, she has continued to develop her skills as a fine artist working primarily in acrylic and oil paint. Kylee’s work has primarily been focused on nature, stylistically ranging from realistic landscapes to more abstract paintings. She works with colour and form, often playing with opposites like curves and straight edges, or light and dark tones to create contrast within her work. Painting abstracted art allows her to escape from reality, creating something completely original from a place only in her mind. While she enjoys the freedom of expression involved in this process, it also brings her great joy to recreate the beauty that surrounds her using representational intricacy within her landscape paintings. 

Alanna Sparanese

Alanna Sparanese is primarily a self-taught artist inspired by the inherent beauty of the natural world.  She is drawn to the extraordinary in the ordinary, capturing the feeling and emotion on canvas, reflected in her luminous layers and enticing textures. Working with the encaustic medium and incorporating mixed media, she finds the possibilities endless as to what can manifest on canvas. Finding the medium both exciting and versatile to work with, she uses various elements of interest; collage, transfer, photographs, drawings and written material.  Oil paints, dry pigments and oils sticks are used to create the desired colour palette of choice. From here… molten layers of pigmented wax are fused onto a substrate, rendering a luscious depth and transparent luminosity….speaking to both the visceral and tactile senses. Alanna finds her muse with a heightened awareness of all that nature offers, from the glorious enveloping sky to the statuesque trees reaching as though full of hope, faith, strength…to the intricate nature of the birdlife, here on Vancouver Island, in constant flow. Within her studio you will find Alanna …painting, creating and courting the muse on a daily basis. Standing in anticipation and excitement…a canvas before her, wanting and waiting….full of possibilities.

Raymond Sapergia

After many years as a master potter and being fortunate to have my work in private collections around the world, I felt it was time for a change. Always loving the texture and beauty of wood, I eventually made the transition from Throwing pots to turning wood.  Both processes require a calm, centered focus so it felt like a natural transition to me.  The absolute excitement of finding those unique one-of-a-kind pieces of various species of natural wood, each unique to itself, has allowed me to take what I see as exquisite shapes and turn them into pieces of art for others to enjoy for years to come. I do not believe anything in nature is "perfect" and that is part of my fascination with wood.  It is not my goal to make perfect pieces of turned wood, but rather to find the most unique, misshapen, unusual pieces and turn them into one-of-a-kind works of art while maintaining as much of their natural beauty as possible.  I love working with live-edge wood leaving as much of that live-edge as possible, or taking cracked pieces and filling them with coloured resin to give them new life and strength. I enjoy finding unique spalted pieces of driftwood from local beaches and salvaging them before they totally disintegrate from the natural decaying process.  I get very excited about wood like this...wood that is on the edge, that is dramatic and fascinating, but hasn't yet become un-usable.  The presence of decay causes an effect called "spalting".  Zone lines caused by this early decay creates dramatic effects of wandering black lines, adding enormously to the character of a wooden bowl or other turned piece.