Wildlife artist Christine Marshall captures the beauty of Mother Nature one stroke at a time in her acrylic work
Jeremy Dickson
Entertainment Reporter
People have three days left to experience Christine Marshall’s Romance of Nature solo art exhibit at the University of Guelph-Humber.
“Her work is beautiful,” said Claudia Soldevilla, a part-time business student. “I like landscape art and I’m currently taking some painting classes so, I understand how hard it is to get the detail.”
Marshall, an accomplished painter from Bala, Ont., is one of Canada’s foremost wildlife artists and has been featured in over 350 exhibitions across Canada, the United States and overseas.
She has painted for over 30 years, specializing in acrylic on canvas, and has been called “Canada’s first lady of wildlife art.” Her new exhibit in the GH art gallery features highly detailed work spanning a career that began in the 1970s.
Early paintings of mushrooms and leaves stand out among numerous animal and landscape scenes featuring owls, hawks, pandas, tigers, loons, koalas, fox, deer and wolves. Her style has been described as romantic realism.
“People say I look at wildlife through a romantic eye or the idealized eye of nature,” Marshall said. “Not the harsh cruel reality world of nature.”
The display includes paintings on large and small canvases as well as plates. Marshall said the opportunity to show her work at Guelph-Humber is unique.
“It’s rare that I get to bring my wildlife and nature art into the centre of the city for an exhibit,” Marshall said, who owns and manages a successful gallery near Bala, Ont..
Special commissions for her work have taken her across North America, Africa, China, Australia and the Arctic to study, sketch and photograph the animals and landscapes found in her paintings.
She started her career capturing smaller mammals like rabbits, squirrels and chipmunks, but gradually moved on to larger beasts.
“You are just in awe being so close to the big ones,” she said. “I didn’t think the moose was a very attractive animal until I saw one closeup. It brought its massive head up out of the muck, water pouring off its rack while the mist rose off the lake and I just saw this very majestic creature.”
Despite a strong connection to realistic environments, Marshall originally experimented with abstract designs in the fine arts program at York University. She said young artists starting their careers should be open to try different things and use all the media available to them. Business law instructor and artist Chuks Oriuwa said there is something more direct about realist paintings. “It’s one thing to see abstract art, but sometimes the artist behind the work gets lost. To see her (Marshall) actually painting and knowing she went to all these places is much different.”
