Linda McKenny

Linda McKenny's landscape paintings take certain cues from Canada's Group of Seven, portraying the nation's spectacular natural scenery in a stylized figurative mode. McKenny's sweeping views of Western Canadian landscapes are more accurately magical realistic. Her style of application subtly exaggerates shading, so that surfaces and textures seem nearly three-dimensional. There's a hint of hyperrealism in such details, as in the glow of McKenny's reflective lakes and distant sun-drenched mountaintops.

Her paintings never exceed such magical renderings of nature, never veer into artifice. Views unfold in a series of planes, as though she is unveiling some unseen spectacle for the viewer. Various cues – most often a body of water – lead the eye through this succession of near and distant areas. McKenny's landscapes frequently depict nature across a river or lake. This sense of spectatorship – of observing from a removed distance – intimates the environmentalist agenda that informs her practice. "My work," McKenny explains, "allows people to become more aware of the beauty being threatened."