Darla Reid

Among the components of prehistory that tell of life on Earth are the fossil record and the cave paintings that are humankind's earliest permanent artistic expressions.  Without specifically evoking either, Darla Reid's acrylic/mixed media seems to combine both, gifting us with visual impressions of the natural world that seem to be eternal records of life, transitory as it may be.  The particularly neat trick Reid pulls off is not so much capturing the objects themselves, but capturing an artistic impression of each, as if it is that impression that was somehow preserved in amber and fossilized.  Reid confines her use of a small range of hues, never straying far from a dominant base tone.  That, along with the fact that the surfaces of her canvas can subtly extend into the third dimension and naturalistically reflect ambient light, further the effect that we have somehow unearthed a heretofore undiscovered artifact of life on Earth and hung it on the wall.

Reid has taken much from her extensive travels but calls British Columbia home.  Her paintings, though, can be found across Canada, the U.S., Europe, and Australia.