Meghan Hildebrand

Please click here to be added to Meghan Hildebrand's special interest list.

I love my small town streets, the fading facades and how sunset lights up shop windows, redirecting shadows and illuminating hidden passages. I love the forest and mountains that lurk beyond our backyards, sheltering a multitude of lives and mysteries, and I love the ocean at my feet, with its ever-changing moods and colours.  With my paintings, I try to explode these sensations of wonder, beyond representation of the actual thing or place. I bring in graphic devices that flip the perspective from day into night or from above to below, and use the delineation between shapes to frame views of possible, simultaneous realities. I draw from a growing roster of symbolic shapes to add explanation and narrative to these exploded views. Triangles can represent trees or tents. Bottle shapes imitate towers or smokestacks. Anthropomorphized forms represent feelings or community, returning the gaze of the viewer.

“Meghan is very much aware of the structure of painting in terms of space and colour, moving with confidence between the abstraction of surface and the illusion of depth embodied in the work to serve the lively content. She accomplishes this with fresh innovations for each work, and although her presence in undeniable, there is no sense of mere repetition but rather continuous expansion of symbolic ideas.”      Norman Yates, Canadian painter and mentor

The daughter of an artist and an underground miner, I grew up in northern Canada trying to reconcile two realities - one where the land is to be worshipped and memorized in art, one where the land exists to be cut up and sold.  I currently reside in the qathet Regional District, on the traditional territory of the Tla’amin Nation, on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, Canada.