LESLEY FINLAYSON

When Vancouver artist Lesley Finlayson was offered a show at The Front Gallery in Edmonton, she decided to do a new body of work about the North Saskatchewan River.

She spent a week last fall drawing in the river's valley, focused less on geography and more on capturing the particularities of light and colour as she sketched weedy stands of poplar and the river's lazy currents.

Back in the studio, she used her drawings to create paintings that flicker between representation and abstraction. “I think the landscape always defines the mark-making as well as the colour that I choose to work with in a painting,” she says. Finlayson seeks what she calls the core of the experience: “The scale of the place, the sound of the wind in those trees that were getting super crisp. It really did feel like it was a finale I was in. It felt like a great crescendo happening in the landscape. I wanted to capture that sense of a year ending.”

Courtesy of the Front Gallery