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About the artist

Jackie Saunders-Ritchie is an artist working in Victoria, BC.

Creation is joy. That is not to say it isn’t hard work; it is. It means that I am fully alive in my studio, mixing and applying vibrant colours to texturally-varied canvas or board. Ever experimental, my art is charged with energy. Art-making for me is, as Picasso noted, “…just another way of keeping a diary”.

I have always been captivated by art. As a child, I added details and shading to my stick figures and primitive landscapes. Later, I immersed myself in lessons from well-known Montreal artists. Over the years, I learned that the trick wasn’t just loving artistic expression as a child, but to retain that joy as an adult.

I was influenced by the African and Inuit sculptures my parents collected, and I later specialized in folk art in my Vancouver antique store. The dramatic and stylized contours had a significant impact on my artwork, fascinating me with their simplicity of image, disregard for detail, and indifference to traditional ideas of proportion. Rarely using preliminary drawings, I paint directly onto surfaces, watching form and colour emerge intuitively.

For many years I worked exclusively in black and white tempera or house enamel, only occasionally adding red oxide. Narrowing my palette forced me to see shape and design clearly. Then I introduced colour. WHAM!! I fell in love.

While I am primarily a painter, my love of texture and form has also led me to collage and mixed media. More recently, I am combining these techniques to create Talisman Blocks — multi-dimensional paintings on small wooden cubes.