Rowena Dykins

Buoy, 2021, acrylic on canvas

About the artist:

Rowena Dykins lives in the Village of Lakefield, surrounded by lakes and rock. She studied fine art at Concordia University, The School of Art and Design at Montreal Museum of Fine Art, and at John Abbot College. 

For many years, Rowena has been interpreting her relationship with the world through abstract painting and installation. The environment around her inspires the colour, atmosphere and formal configurations in the strokes and body of the paint of her work. Using palette knives and brushes to layer acrylic paint on canvases or board, she builds, removes, adds, reworks, scrapes and forms her paintings. Rowena’s bold shapes and marks comment on memory and her relationship with place.

Recently, figures have started to emerge in her paintings. Rowena feels compelled to paint these figures, to observe the personal elements that are starting to emerge with titles such as “My hands are turning into branches, I am a waterfall.” In this, she finds herself and her work in a stage of transition. Rowena continues to explore the development of this work daily in her studio and loves the process of filling a painting full of colour and stories, a key to growing this new work.