Lights Fantastic

Wielding tools as diverse as palette knives, bottles, hand-cut stencils, silkscreen materials and airbrushes, Sheila Kernan transforms remote mountain scenes and intensely vibrant urban vignettes into fantastical reflections of places abuzz with energy and colour. Out-of-focus backgrounds, layered strokes and a filtered-through-memory perspective often conjure multiple cities and, yet, no one city in particular.

“I’ve always been attracted to how cities come alive at nighttime,” says Kernan, who’s all of 26 years old. “At night, there are light traces from cars, reflections off the sides of buildings and, with all the glasswork, there are so many colours. It almost overwhelms the senses.”

Kernan, a member of the Alberta Society of Artists and Federation of Canadian Artists, was the featured artist for the Stampede Rotary Dream Home in 2008. See her work at Calgary’s Gibson Fine Art and Banff’s Stratus Gallery.