MARA KORKOLA:  SMALL PAINTINGS

Mara Korkola’s captivating works compress worlds of information into small intimate oil paintings. The featured sunset paintings are based on photographs taken from hiking trips along the west coast of British Columbia. The intimate night paintings are based on photographs taken from evening walks through tree-lined streets of Vancouver neighbourhoods.

Late evening is Korkola’s signature time of day. This is when she prefers to paint as it allows for uninterrupted sessions working wet on wet, a technique that gives her paintings their lush and fluid surfaces.  The interplay between the landscape and the light is perhaps what excites Korkola most, prompting buttery brushstrokes in electric colour.

When asked what she hopes people will experience from one of her paintings, she answered “something like a pause, a poem, an introspection, a connection to something bigger than themselves, a moment of beauty in ordinary life.”

Korkola’s night paintings, which she documents on foot, focus on the intersection of nature and cities. Each city she has painted including New York, Chicago, Toronto, Detroit, San Francisco, Vancouver and Belgrade, has a specific feeling while still remaining relatively anonymous.

Mara Korkola graduated from the Ontario College of Art, Toronto (AOCA); Wichita State University, Kansas (BFA) and the University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio (MFA).  She has exhibited in group and solo exhibitions in Canada, the US and Germany, including Painting as Paradox at Artists Space in New York, Synthetic Psychosis at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, Auto-Motive: World from the Windshield, Oakville Galleries, Ontario, Sequence and Passage: Mara Korkola and Monica Tap at Cambridge Galleries in Cambridge, Ontario, and Commuter, a comprehensive solo exhibition of her No Place series of paintings at the MacLaren Art Centre in Barrie, Ontario.

Korkola’s work has been reviewed in Canadian Art, Border Crossings, C Magazine, The Globe and Mail, The National Post, and Now Magazine among others, and has been included in Carte Blanche Vol 2 – Painting, a national survey of Canadian painters. Her work is held in private and corporate collections, including Scotia Bank, Fidelity Investments and Hydro Quebec.  www.marakorkola.com