Sherry Park

Stepping into the Alton Mill Arts Centre, often considered an artistic sanctuary in Ontario, Canada, the sound of water flowing through the antique stone buildings and the lush energy of the forest envelop your entire body. Sherry Park's studio, nestled in this very place, makes it instantly clear why her works are so peaceful yet brimming with vitality. Every day, she takes walks through the woods, observing the sunlight as it filters through the leaves and capturing the exact moments when those particles of light settle upon nature and people. The reason Park's work resonates so deeply with so many is that she doesn't practice a cold realism that merely replicates a subject's outward appearance; instead, she paints the "temperature of the soul" residing within. Though she uses photographs as a starting point, she is never bound by them. Rather, she remarks, "I want the brushstrokes to show," thoughtfully layering honesty and a deep affection for her subjects within her soft brushwork.

In her work, figures and landscapes might seem like divergent paths, but they actually converge on a single theme: "light, air, and life." To Park, portraits and landscapes are subjects of equal weight. Just as she reads a person's life history through the wrinkles and gaze that bear the passage of time in a portrait, she discovers unique personalities and vitality in the trees of the forest. During her residency at Cape Breton Highlands National Park, amid the solitude of the quiet woods, she deeply observed how the trees rooted themselves in the earth and embraced the light. The devotion of applying four to five layers to bring out the inner light when painting a human face, and the vigor of shaping a tree's framework with bold brushstrokes in a landscape, ultimately stem from a singular desire to reach the essence of the subject.