Kayla Sommer
Visual Artist
Kayla’s work often begins with the examination of different colour schemes, patterns and textures captured in her photos.
Though Kayla has been creative all her life, her professional art career is recent, beginning in 2019, when she decided to pursue painting in depth, attending continuing education courses in the visual arts at the University of Alberta.
Prior to pursuing painting, she had and still has a passion for landscape photography, which has since inspired her acrylic abstract paintings. In addition to landscapes and nature, Kayla also takes inspiration from the architecture of her home city and those she’s visited around the world.
“My process is ever changing and my mark making is often sporadic and unplanned. I prefer to work in the moment with whatever is inspiring me at the time.”
Kayla Most recent series titles ‘Coordinates’ begins as an ustretched piece of raw canvas brought with her during her travels over the course of the past summer. Some pieces were painted on the end of a dock on a lake in Northern B.C. others on a rocky beach, the deck of a small cabin in the woods, picnic tables and gravel campsite floors.
Her goal with these pieces was not only to paint the landscapes that surrounded her but for the canvases to adopt pieces of the landscape itself. Specks of dust. Grains of sand. She wanted the work to become one with the location she was in and to bring a deeper sense of meaning to the piece. Each one is titled with the rough latitude and longitude of the location it was painted in or inspired by.
The frames of these pieces were also created similarly, as the wood was milled from my family’s acreage. Made from Alberta poplar and aspen trees, each frame is handcrafted with care and precision by Garry Sommer (the artist’s father).
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Kayla Sommer