The Artist Lynda Fownes

On the Work

Every painting begins with a walk. Not to sketch or photograph, but to absorb — the particular green of second-growth cedar after rain, the way light catches birch bark at golden hour, the geometry of roots breaking over granite.

Lynda's practice started at UBC, where studies in Art Education opened doors to ceramics, textiles, and printmaking. Each discipline left its imprint: the textural instincts of fibre art, the pattern-thinking of weaving, the bold colour sense of painted clay. For years, she circled back to these threads until they converged on the canvas.

The current body of work lives squarely on the West Coast. Trails through Lynn Valley, the mossy silence of old growth, fire-lit evenings at the edge of nowhere — these are the raw materials. But the paintings aren't literal. Colours run hotter than nature. Textures are amplified. The familiar is rendered just strange enough to make you look again.

My aspiration is to look at unusual things with unusual eyes.

Nonstandard canvas sizes are chosen deliberately — a narrow vertical to capture the soar of a fir, a wide panoramic for the sprawl of a lake. The format serves the subject, never the other way around.