Looking at the sky.
Grounded by the smell of the earth, the crisp air in her lungs after taking a full breath. Feeling the cool earth beneath her hand, freezing her fingers.
Looking at the tall grass as it disrupts a perfect horizon line, seeing the warm tones in the ground contrasted against the coolness of a clouded sky.
Feeling the subtle warmth of the sun as it touches her.
Hearing the echo of a bird flapping its wings in flight.
She sat on a tiny log at the edge of a large field and looked: witnessing nature in its wondrous simplicity and stillness.
Grace’s artistic research consists of breaking the routine numbness of day-to-day life, taking time to simply look at the sky or surrounding landscaping. Her creative process is focused on producing a body of work that highlights her act of stepping away from the chaos of life in order to find moments of calm. She is working to preserve these frozen moments of the beautiful present by translating them into paintings, which are based on photographs taken of the sky when it has left her mesmerized. While these painted snapshots of clouds are frozen in their progression across the substrates, her thin build up of oil paint layers and cropped compositions create movement and maintain the energy that lives naturally in the real moment.
Her intention for her paintings is to not only investigate light in its interactions with the ever-changing sky, but to radiate a sense of tranquility — showcasing the delicate, dramatic, and transient nature of clouds. Grace aims to spark a feeling of awe by recreating an environment in which the viewer can bear witness to the vast ethereal beauty of the sky.
Grace Nascimento-Laverdiere was born and raised in Squamish BC, Canada. She grew up with a love of art, playing with pencil crayon and watercolour for the majority of her childhood. As she got older and began to grow into her potential as an artist, she explored the use of many mediums, including graphite, charcoal, clay, ink, acrylic paint, print-making, and oil paint. Her love of oil paints combined with her fascination with the endless expanse of sky and vast landscapes of British Columbia, resulted in continuous inspiration, rich layers of colour, and a body of work centred around showcasing beautifully captured moments of the natural world.
Grace’s education in art has consisted of personal training in the French Academic System of Art under her mentor Angela Muellers, a local Squamish artist. She is continuing her artistic studies by attending the University of British Columbia in Kelowna, where she is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts.