Denny Manchee

I spent my working life as a journalist, writer and editor, but began to explore watercolour in the mid-1990s when my kids were doing an art class in Edmonton. One class led to another, and over the years I’ve studied at the Toronto School of Art, the Visual Arts Centre in Montreal and Central Technical School, and have taken intensive workshops with Pat Fairhead, Gary Smith, Lorna Mulligan, Robert Burridge, Patti Mollica, Brian Smith, Anne Hoover and Louise Fletcher. 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 and Pat Fairhead, and the singing palettes of Wolf Kahn, Carlos San Millan and Samantha Buller. 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.