Artist Bio and Statement
Olga practiced Aboriginal law for many years before returning to her love of the human figure in visual art. In 2010, she exhibited in her first juried art prize show in Ottawa, and has been exhibiting her figurative work ever since. In 2016, she moved with her husband to a high forested hillside on Salt Spring Island and set up her studio surrounded by towering Douglas fir, enormous-leafed maple, and sinuous arbutus trees, with eagles soaring by at eye-level.
“Salt Spring Island changed me. I see myself primarily as a figurative artist, but once I began entering the forest, listening to it, feeling it around me, something moved within me. I felt the same passion I feel for the human figure, but on a different level: an ancient kinship. There is, in the forest, a presence of masculine and feminine and the in-between, in a slowly unfolding drama that sometimes quickens. For the first time in my life, I wanted to paint the landscape - right there, in the moment, in it. And so began my plein air landscape painting, which I believe is an extension of my figurativepractice.”
“Communion,” at the Salt Spring Gallery July 23 - August 11, is an intensely personal testament to Olga’s relationship with the forest. The landscapes are all painted outside, in an act of communion with the forest. They mark the changing colours throughout the day and the play of light from one moment to the next, The heat of the sun, and the coolness - even cold! - of shade in the same spot as a cloud passes by. The buzz of the ground bee, the wasp on patrol at the same time each afternoon, the chirp of the tree frog, the gang of chickadees grazing the artist’s shoulder. The shrew scamperingover her foot. The sudden crash of a dead tree branch from on high. The fir needles dropped onto her palette. These are all present all at once in the layers, textures, and mixtures of Communion.
