Pauline Horricks
Oil and Acrylic Painting

From a youth spent in the wilds of Northern Ontario, themes dominating the works of Pauline Horricks exhibit a fascination with light and shadow, both in nature and the human form. Horricks began her journey with art over 25 years ago as a self-taught watercolorist. For 15 years she painted and sold works that graduated from dramatic landscape themes to conceptual pieces about women. These pieces exist in private and corporate collections all over North America. In the mid 90s, her fascination for light and shadow led her to study printmaking at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario.

In early 1998, she began experimenting with plaster as an intaglio printing alternative to the conventional etching press. Although this medium is not unique, it is unusual - the plaster becoming an integral part of the piece as a whole. Horricks feels that the printing of etchings and collagraphs on plaster offers more spontaneous use of shape and value for conceptual expression. Also, it lends itself to some degree of 'dimensionality', which enhances the overall impact of the image.

More recently Horricks has returned to painting with oil on large textured panels, continuing to depict the patterns of light and shadow in the Boreal Forest. Her new series, entitled "Boreal Music", captures the drama of light, shadow, reflection and structural patterns in the northern rainforest.

I have spent my  life surrounded by the Boreal Forest and have dedicated the past 5 years of my art career  to chronicling the beauty of the forest. Normally, my paintings are on panel which I coat and texture with gesso.  They require no frame as they have a 1 1/2" edge built around and painted as a part of the whole. I paint with oils as if they were watercolor, rubbing the oil in (and off) to create translucent washes of color mixed with deep darks for strong contrast.

In the summer of 2008, I was an “Artist in Residence” (along with my partner Peter Humeniuk) at Quetico Provincial Park – one of Ontario’s wilderness parks in the Boreal Forest.

The Boreal is our northern rainforest.  Can the earth afford to lose it?