Suspended in Light
I am a visual artist living in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Since graduating from art academy, I have spent more than four decades working as an international visual artist, a public and private art educator, and a fiction writer.
Devoted to many forms of art, I remain in constant dialogue with the endlessly shifting visual field. This ceaseless movement has shaped my work and my life, repeatedly transforming my perception of self. I find myself immersed in a conceptual realm, suspended within it, emancipated by the intensity of light.
Experience
40+ yrs
Exhibitions, teaching, and writing across Europe & North America
Medium
Oil & light
Architecture, silence, and vivid Mediterranean colour
Petronella Sirbu
Contemporary visual artist and author of short stories
Artist statement
A cinema of walls and light
The stories behind these paintings dawned on me as soon as I landed in the middle of the fabulous French Riviera. Taking in busy towns and deserted villages, crawling up and down the hills, my memory filled up with their forms and colours and quirky details, but more than that with the silence and the voices of the walls and the untold stories behind them.
Like shuffling through a silent movie set, the streets - some empty, some crowded - caressed by the wind and hugged by the pervasive beauty, impressed by the ruins, the shades and the deep nuances of the Mediterranean coast, the picturesque sky tint, I was overwhelmed.
A note from the studio
Each canvas is an architecture of memory. I work slowly, layering thin veils of pigment until the light feels suspended within the surface. Silence is its own medium: it lets every texture and edge breathe.
Petronella Sirbu
Toronto, Canada