heather ROY

heather ROY

ARTIST STATEMENT

My paintings are meditations and daydreams about human relationships and how we fit or don’t fit in our environment. Our discomforts, the myths and incongruences we live with, how we feel about being in the world at this time. We have become a truly global society, but we still live in a tribal swamp of unresolved human emotion that exists in an uneasy partnership with the highly sophisticated communications network linking us to worlds far beyond our imagination.

I paint from a deep place. Mostly oils, presently encaustic – I feel the medium and intent draw me in to what is always an adventure.
Many years ago, I began working in an abstract fashion, allowing me access to the pure world of form and feeling that is always restricted by representation. While life drawing was an important part of my practice, it did not feature in my painting.
Several years ago, I had a change of heart and began to want to use figures to communicate. I went back to school, and took 12 courses at the Toronto School of Art to help me render my figure drawing in fully realized painted compositions.

My recent work reflects both these directions, and I am working towards a synthesis that will offer scope for the pathos of human life and the openness afforded by abstraction. Always, my goal is to create work that reaches deeply inside the viewer, to tender, vulnerable and nonverbal places.