To be in a studio surrounded by the paintings of Michael Foers is enough to take one’s breath away. Colour abounds at every turn, taking its shape in the form of forests, rivers, ponds, hidden trails. And if you truly drink in the mood of his richly textured canvases, you can hear the call of northern Ontario beckoning. Foers opened his Essa studio seven years ago. At the time, he had just made the transition from forester to full-time painter, trading in his chainsaws for paintbrushes.
The barn studio, which he built with the help of friends, is now filled with large, often boldly painted canvases. Some of them are completed and some not quite. All are destined for specific galleries throughout North America.
“It’s something I always wanted to do,” the Britishborn artist said when he was starting out in 2000, as he looked ahead with prudence to the challenge of making a full-time career out of this passion.
Flash forward to the Michael Foers of today, whose works are now in such high demand that the artist has had to turn down requests from galleries who want to show his work. He has virtually no time to do private commissions. He is currently represented by Envers Chapin Gallery in Toronto, which distributes his work around the world. He has also built solid working relationships with a few other Canadian galleries, from Quebec to B.C, one of those being Cookstown’s Gallery on Queen.
His travels have taken him to Venus, Tuscany and the South of France, where he lived in a rented car and showered at truck stops. He spent most of his days driving around, easel at the ready, looking for landscapes to paint. “I had one suitcase for clothes, and the other for paintings (which could handily hold eight shrink-wrapped canvasses),” he says.
Foers’ paintings are largely landscapes, his earlier work often focusing on capturing the beauty of earlymorning light on a pond, similar to the impressionistic style of Claude Monet, one of his favourite artists.
Over the past few years, save for a few urban landscapes he painted while in Venice, Foers’ favourite subject has been the northern Ontario landscape, with its clear, quiet waters and boreal forests. The warmth of fall resonates throughout those canvases, as subtle layers of red, blue, yellow, green and purple at a forest’s edge mingle with a winding river and a moody sky at dusk.
“I bring energy and life into a painting to reflect the energy and life in the natural world,” Foers explains, adding that he uses colour to create depth.
Artist Profile: Michael Foers
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