A painting created for mood and atmosphere, a breath of cool fresh air for a hot summer. A resting place for the eyes. When we fly from Powell River to Vancouver, we get to watch the incredible coast mountains go by in their seemingly endless vastness to the east, and to the west many small islands with Vancouver Island in the distance. Mountains are one of the earliest things I can remember drawing, loving the way you can just keep adding more and more triangular peaks. With the combination of patterned areas, I tried to depict different types of mineral and water bodies.
Meghan Hildebrand's paintings invite the viewer to get lost in worlds with few boundaries. Within dreamlike explorations of real and imagined landscapes, colours and forms are built up intuitively. Experimentation and spontaneous mark-making lend raw energy to the paintings. Drawing from environmental observation, painterly invention, and the inclusion of a wide vocabulary of visual symbols, unexpected breakthroughs keep Hildebrand in a constant process of reinvention, and her work ever-changing. Trees, tents, bottle shapes and colour-coded dots can represent community or industry, while anthropomorphized forms return the gaze of the viewer. A distorted sense of scale lends a magical quality to her work, creating scenes that tend to lose their logic the longer you look, inviting new translations.
“Meghan is very much aware of the structure of painting in terms of space and colour, moving with confidence between the abstraction of surface and the illusion of depth embodied in the work to serve the lively content. She accomplishes this with fresh innovations for each work, and although her presence in undeniable, there is no sense of mere repetition but rather continuous expansion of symbolic ideas.” - Norman Yates
Originally from Whitehorse, Yukon, Meghan now resides on the Sunshine Coast of BC.