untitled (Spanish Still Life)

ARTIST STATEMENT -

I make oil paintings about memory: how we hold onto moments, places and people, and how they change as we carry them.

My source material is daily life. I have an archive of 20,000+ photographs I've taken, hundreds of family photographs and slides, and I stage photos based on memories that were never recorded. These are my jumping off point. From the original photograph, I often crop further to hone in on what's most important to me, the part that holds the feeling. From there, each painting goes its own way. I move between representation and abstraction. Colour is my main tool. I push palettes far past what the camera saw, trying to fill the painting with how the moment felt rather than how it looked. Memory is unreliable. It exaggerates, distorts and drops things. This is where painting can go much further than photography can.
For years I painted figures in landscape, often the Niagara Escarpment or the Bay of Fundy. My current series narrows the frame to hands. Hands show age, labour, care, nerves and confidence, and they’re often more honest than faces. They carry their own memory: playing an instrument, making a favorite meal for a loved one, or scratching just the right spot behind your dog's ear.

Much of life has moved onto screens, and casual touch has become less automatic. Living in Spain, far from friends and family, I feel that absence deeply. Oil painting is slow and physical. Paint is mixed by hand and built up in layers over months, and the finished surface keeps every mark. Making paintings about hands, by hand, is my argument that we are physical beings who learn and remember through touch, and that some kinds of connection can’t be mediated by a screen. I want viewers to feel what they’re seeing in their own hands.

Erica Beyea, 2026