I feel very lucky that my studies have taken me abroad to two wonderful cities, where I have met many people that I feel privileged to call friends. For anyone who is thinking about whether or not to study abroad or take part in an exchange program, I fully recommend it. My experiences in London and Paris are some of my most cherished, and in both cases, it was the people I met and the city itself that left their lasting impressions on me.
The splendour of Paris
It’s hard to believe that it has been 10 years since my year abroad in Paris. I traveled all the way across the world only to meet a fellow Canadian student from NSCAD in Halifax! Mary Porter is a fellow artist and painter and one of my very good friends.
Installation of “The Space to be.” at Toronto Free Gallery,
Toronto, ON, 2007
She currently lives and works in Toronto, after receiving an MFA (Visual Arts) from York University. She has exhibited across Canada and was also selected as an Canadian emerging artist to watch in Magenta Publishing’s Carte Blanche, Vol. 2: Painting.
Her most recent series, MONUMENTAL (2008-09), offers an intriguing perspective on landscape painting with such diverse influences such as science fiction, grand architectural schemes, nineteenth- and twentieth-century utopic plans, romantic landscape painting, and her own studies of the plants and animals in her urban setting.
Untitled (tapeworm), oil and acrylic on birch plywood,
24 in x 72 in, 2009