The holiday season in London hosts many special activities. Among them is the Christmas Show, hosted by Westland Gallery in Wortley Village.
The exhibition features various local artists as it runs throughout the month of December, with special guests every weekend, showcasing their own unique styles of art.
This weekend’s features included Olga Cooper. Her encaustic style of art focuses on heat. “This is an ancient process that comes from the Egyptians and the Greeks, she explains. “It involves heating beeswax, and pigmenting that with oil paint to get the colours. We heat this on a griddle, keep it at a standard temperature, and we paint with it hot.”
Cooper says her inspiration comes from her belief that we often overlook the beautiful simplicities of nature. She describes her inspiration as “looking at very simple things in nature and getting joy from them.”
She adds, “I do have a cottage up in Muskoka, so I absolutely love trees of all kinds during all the seasons and the way they change.”
Cooper says she also loves the freedom and the endless possibilities of encaustic art. “There’s really no wrong way to do it,” she says. “Sometimes what you think are going to be your real mistakes in it as you’re working away, then suddenly you discover, ‘oh, that’s kind of cool, or that colour came out really interestingly,’ and that’s sort of the neat thing about it.”
Next weekend, Westland Gallery will showcase even more local artists, including the ceramic sculptures of Danielle Hoevenaars and Dauma Stirbyte.
