Featured Artist Kirk Sutherland

Artist Kirk Sutherland presents a vibrant and uplifting portfolio that reflects his mastery of color and emotional intuition. View more on his website.

 

 

I’m a Toronto based, Canadian-born, Scottish artist. I have exhibited my work under the representation of many art galleries internationally over the last 35 years. Many of my pieces are included in private, public and corporate collections globally.

 

 

I graduated high honors from the Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCADU) in 1991, majoring in Contemporary Art and Drawing and Painting from the Faculty of Experiential Arts. I’m a renowned colorist who was born with synesthesia. Synesthesia is a blending and a cross over of the senses. For me colors have favors, sounds configure and frequencies speak a dialect.

 

 

This sensory perception enhances my overall creative process. I instinctively bridge and amalgamate both intuitive and conscious realities in my creative process. My paintings find their origin from the unseen metaphysical world of feelings, emotions and thoughts. For my work doesn’t imitate life, but instead it harnesses the energy and essence of life and experience.

 

 

Within the realm of art making, I surrender a degree of control, yet I profoundly feel that my work does not fall into what could be defined as random or chance. I truly believe that everything has purpose and meaning in this dimension. Making art to me is a necessary condition that emerges from both the instinctual and compositionally deliberate. I feel the process is equally as important as the result and outcome.

 

 

In essence it’s a spiritual, ethereal experience in many ways, but somewhat dichotomously grounded at the same time. I find myself channeling to a higher energy or light, in which the medium, the action, the experience and the presence act as an umbilical between the material world, the essence soul and higher self.

 

 

My art has been critically described as visually vibrant, emotionally evoking, mystical and hermetically psychedelic as well as spiritually ethereal. I’m influenced by many things. The New York School and abstract expressionism, the Color Field movement, and lyrical abstraction. Impressionism, orphism, fauvism and dadaism.

 

 

Some of the key modern artistic masters that have had an impact on me are Hans Hofmann, Henri Matisse, Helen Frankenthaler, Claude Monet, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, Barnett Newman, Richard Diebenkorn, Marcel Duchamp and so many others. Canadian influences include Jack Bush, the Painters Eleven, Montreal’s Les Automatistes and Nouveaux Plasticiens, as well as Paul Sloggett, Daniel Solomon, Jim Tiley, Robert Hedrick, Graham Coughtry, Gordon Rayner, and Francois Thepot for OCADU.

 

 

My work draws from nature and the organic cyclical existence within the natural realm. In many ways I find myself connected to the repetition of patterns, rhythms, and renewal found in nature and in our universe. I witness, see and experience a world that is poetically philosophical.

 

 

In my 35-year career I have worked with the Hollywood Film Industry, where I’ve been credited in motion pictures. I’ve created and designed many pieces of public art in urban environments. I have participated in many site-specific concept installations and worked with the in North American and European music industry creating album cover designs.

 

Kirk Sutherland invites you to follow on Instagram and both of his Facebook profiles.

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