Erica Beyea

Erica Beyea is a Moncton, NB based artist. She grew up in New Brunswick but has only recently returned after more than 20 years living in Toronto and Spain. She studied at OCAD University and graduated with a BFA, Honours from NSCAD in 2005.

In 2014, she founded Girls’ Art League, a non-profit organization dedicated to the empowerment of women and girls through visual art education. She has received grants from the Ontario Arts Council and has shown her work across Canada and southern Spain.

Since moving back to the Maritimes, landscape has taken a larger presence in her paintings. After spending more than half of her life away, she sees the natural beauty of this region with fresh eyes.  You will always find a figure, human or animal, within the composition. It serves as a proxy for you to enter the painting yourself.

Artist Statement

Using personal photographs as a jumping off point, each painting goes its own way from there. Oscillating between representation and abstraction, I try to saturate each painting with the emotion and internal experience of the moment the photo was taken.

I am completely obsessed with colour, and this is my primary tool for adding emotion to the particular moment I am representing. I’m always experimenting with different palettes and how far I can take them.

I’m exploring our perception of place and how it morphs over time. Our memories are famously inaccurate. Our emotions and thoughts distort, exaggerate and strip away parts of any given experience or place we have visited or lived in. Trying to reproduce the intangible via the very fixed medium of oil paint, I take pleasure in the impossibility of the endeavour. A celebration of our human nature, our faulty observation skills, and the magic that this brings to our personal experiences and memories.