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It's the way I see things.
Sometimes it overwhelms me.
It can be so small and everyday and seemingly inconsequential.
It's the angle of the light at a particular time of day.
Or the exact colour of a particular object at a specific moment.
Or an unexpected minute mirrored image.
It becomes an aesthetic imperative to stop whatever I am doing and pay attention.
It's the way I think.
I map memories in a visual cartography.
 

Artist's Statement


While anxiously concerned with contemporary life, I nurture constructive resilience, to transcend darkness with that other reality- light-filled beauty. The initial visual mental imagery of the artwork I "see" before picking up the brush, remains like an echo of a past retina experience. As the painting unfolds, patterns and details are revealed. It is a (kind of) conversation that takes place at many levels: visual, aesthetic, philosophical, spiritual, intellectual and emotional. While painting outdoors studying nature, sharp memories of a place and time are heightened by necessity in a unique, focused, deeply intense interaction with a transitory and elusive moment coded in a shorthand visual language that enables recall decades later. Larger paintings, like this one of Vermilion Lakes, are based on smaller sketches. It's the way I see things. Sometimes it overwhelms me. It can be so small and everyday and seemingly inconsequential. It's the angle of the light at a particular time of day. Or the exact colour of a particular object at a specific moment. Or an unexpected minute mirrored image. It becomes an aesthetic imperative to stop whatever I am doing and pay attention. It's the way I am. I map memories in a visual cartography.

Artist's Biography

Maureen Flynn-Burhoe BVA MA


Museum work early on at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery and later at the National Gallery of Canada, provided me with priceless hours of intimate exposure to art that informs my own. My years of formal art education at Mount Allison University and l'Universite du Quebec a Chicoutimi and graduate studies at Carleton University gave me invaluable lifelong tools of technical craftsmanship, critical thinking and exposure to contemporary theory. I have actively sought out unfamiliar social, cultural and physical landscapes that gratefully, through my contact with local Baha'is, became familiar. I paint and draw in response to everyday life experiences in places that became home: from Prince Edward Island to New Brunswick, the Congo, Ontario, Quebec, Iqaluit, Nunavut, Vancouver Island and currently Calgary, Alberta. I was fortunate to have a succession of home or co-op studios and exhibition spaces and opportunities. My work is in private collections in Canada, Europe, the Congo and Brazil and has been published in magazines, used online and is in the Canada Council Art Bank. For the last four years, I have been participating regularly in the Federation of Canadian Artists' juried exhibitions in Calgary and Vancouver.