artists

Denny Manchee

 

I’ve spent my working life as a journalist, writer, and editor (dennymanchee.com), but I began to explore watercolour in the mid-1990s when my kids were doing an art class in Edmonton – why should they have all the fun! One class led to another, and over the years I’ve studied at the Toronto School of Art, the Visual Arts Centre in Montreal, Central Technical School, LucSculpture, and have taken intensive workshops with painters such as Kelley Aitken, Pat Fairhead, Gary Smith, Lorna Mulligan and Frances Alty-Arscott. As Joni Mitchell wrote and sang, “Every picture has its shadow and it has its source of light; blindness, blindness and sight.” This essential truth continues to challenge and inspire me, as do the loose watercolours of Andrew Wyeth, the singing palettes of Wolf Kahn and Pat Fairhead, and the stillness and minimalism of Tony Onley. Landscape and the quotidian, exterior and interior, these are my primary subjects, as I try to capture moments of awareness in our technology-saturated world. Painting has existed in the margins of my life to now, but with our move to Northumberland in 2013 I hope to pull it to the centre.