On the cold night of Jan. 21, The Buzz Restaurant offered a warm entrance to Amy Harrison’s new drawing exhibition called Intuitions: A Drawing Exhibition.
Located at Bank and Gilmour, the cozy lounge decorated its dimly lit wall with an array of birds, flying racoons, flower cats, and other surreal fairy-tale-like drawings.
Harrison compared her creative process to daydreaming.
“The way that I paint my images is based on the way that I’m feeling at the time, it’s like I layer things and take things out of my imagination just intuitively, based on my feelings, my thoughts, what I think is beautiful and works together.”
“I like how simple they are yet they’re expressing a lot. I love nature and when I see anything related to nature, it spurs up emotions in me. Every drawing expresses a story in them. That’s the amazing part,” said Adi, a student from Algonquin college.
While it may appear simple on the surface, Harrison’s work required a lot of intuition. On simple white canvases, she chose pictures from magazines, online, and layered them on top of each other.
“If I like how they look, I’ll put it aside and draw the image onto the paper and add other things to it,” she said.
Her lines are detailed and while most of her drawings are mainly black and white, Harrison uses different mediums such as watercolour pencil, pencil crayon, chalk pastel, chalk oil, and ink pencils to bring subtle colours that add to the dream-like attributes of each creation.
With the main subject of her exhibition being flora and fauna, birds were a large aspect of the exhibition.
“Birds are so beautiful, they can fly, they’re untouchable, and they’re not really there, like ghosts or angels . . . and I put these little ideas into images,” Harrison said.
Harrison claims her exhibition expresses an “appreciation of decoration and beautiful things.”
Harrison has had exhibitions in many other Canadian cities such as Toronto, London, Stratford, and Calgary. However, Harrison considers Ottawa to be a thriving city.
“I like Ottawa, there’s a lot of culture and it’s the place to be right now.”
“I feel she takes a more feminine intuition or perspective on a lot of natural nature-based items. It has very fine lines and details. It’s very cohesive, well organized and pleasurable to look at,” said Jordan Laurin, a bartender at The Buzz restaurant.
“When she sees things she sees beyond them,” said Josée Brouillette, an attendee and friend of Harrison.
Within an hour of the vernissage, Harrison had already sold one of her paintings.
The exhibition’s curator is Marcus Lamoureux, who is part of the Skullcap Promotions group, formerly known as Basement Artists.
The exhibition runs until March 18.
