Ontario Views: Picturing My Canadian Landscape 
                                                   Art and Design by Kidist Paulos Asrat

About Ontario Views: Picturing My Landscape

I have traveled as far north as Lake Huron, and Lake Simcoe, from where I produced watercolour paintings as tribute to the Group of Seven artists. And further south, I captured the magnificence of the Niagara Falls with my camera.


I used mono-printing, a printing method on paper, to render Lake Ontario both in winter and in summer.


I used the Ontario’s  trillium flower as a motif to print on fabric, wall-paper, for upholstery on chairs, and on lampshades, mugs, and other household items.


Bringing townhouse gables to print, I have produced tablecloths, table runners, wall-hangings and greeting cards for practical, functional use, and as an homage to our urban landscape. The gables become a design metaphor for home.


The fabric prints of Toronto’s buildings are intertwined with blossom trees, reminding us that even urban areas can be close to nature.


Mississauga's City Hall figures as an exercise in architecture, geometry and shape, where I photographically capture the beautiful, award-winning building close up. Nearby, hidden behind the impressive walls of the City Hall, is the magical Jubilee Garden, small and perfect, which the diligent gardeners maintain throughout the four seasons, planting and pruning.


These images are not only for gallery walls, but are also for real-life locations, where their aesthetics and their function are intertwined. They go "beyond the wall," and their patterns become part of our life, part of our motif, part of our Canadian landscape, within our own homes, intimately experienced in our own hearth.


Picturing My Landscape provides a subtle, artistic language of images and image-based works to connect us all to our landscape, and with each other.