Lost in the Forest Painting

Holly Friesen is a contemporary Canadian landscape painter based in Montreal, QC whose paintings evoke the natural environment as embodied experience which she feels is essential to a contemporary understanding of the earth. She learns what she needs to know about survival by painting. "The more I paint the less separation there is between inner and outer ecologies which results in a linking of perceptions with the natural world where attempts to define or control are useless. For me, painting is like deep prayer awakening a reverence for the earth's inner landscape; the image is in you and you are in the image. Painting is my breath, beauty my compass, and the earth my body."