Alisha Roe, 35, has been painting since she was old enough to hold a brush. She attended an art high school and Concordia University in Montreal. Roe works in a variety of mediums but at the moment is painting landscapes with acrylics.

Her primary influences are American realist painter Andrew Wyeth, European figurative sculptors, German expressionists and some young contemporary artists she met recently in Ontario.

“I like figurative painting, but I’ve been concentrating on landscape for three years,” since moving to Jasper.

Painting is her sole occupation; she works from photographs and assembled montages of panoramic mountain views. She is working in large format, making paintings that the viewer can step into. Prussian blue dominates her current output.

“I try and create an environment that draws the viewer in, a peaceful scene in nature that reminds one of their own natural essence, gives them a moment to relax and not think and just be, and experience the beauty of nature.”

Small paintings command $1,000, larger canvases, $7,000 for four by six feet. She paints in a small basement room of a rented house.

“I need a larger studio,” she says. Roe and her husband  are moving to a new house in Tete Jaune next summer, an hour from Jasper.

“Nature has always been an inspiration to me. My vertical compositions come right up to your feet so you can walk into it. I also do panoramic vistas that create a sense of space. I want to leave the viewer with the peace of nature, a quiet mind, calmness.”

She is planning a series of figurative paintings that “will be all about intimacy and touch, and skin. It will be vignettes of body parts and full figures.  Erotic, some of them, in warm colours, with abstract backgrounds of folds of cloth, so that body parts will be warm and flesh-toned. Intimate little cuts of those moments.”

Works in Progress is an invitation to anyone who creates something of interest from their imagination, skill and material at hand to share images and descriptions of their work, motivation and inspiration with Fitzhugh readers.