My Urban Bicycle Garden paintings are city landscapes dense with ever-emergent gardens, walking and cycling paths, green-space and flora. They celebrate creative life in cities with gardens tended in all manner of living situations: front yards, balconies, rooftops and community gardens; with cohesive cycling infrastructure and “within walking distance” paths to local businesses, restaurants and theatres through treed neighbourhoods and ravines with a renewed connection to small, regional farms.
Over many years, I have been slowly unearthing and establishing a visual language for this personal view of observed and remembered space. In my over thirty years as a painter, I have always had a fascination with exploring figure and ground through complex interior and exterior spatial relationships. These compositions are travelled; meandering on multiple planes, with the familiar vernacular of neighbourhood houses, city architecture and public space, brought to the surface and opened-up, to interior living environments: kitchens, cafes and libraries. In their execution, from the early washes to the overlay between spaces, the paintings explore the organized and unexpected entanglement between cities and farms, kitchens and gardens and buildings and wild spaces. The artworks present urban design that acknowledges and enhances the necessary connectivity between humans and the natural world within the dense environment of cities.
A prairie childhood in the Midwest, a young adulthood in Montreal and a settled life as artist, mother and grandmother in Edmonton, informs an inner landscape of small town, ancestral farm, and vibrant city. Most recently, I have been exploring these paintings through the lens of Human Ecology – Material Culture, towards a MA degree from the University of Alberta.
Artist Statement
Jill Thomson
Growing up in a small Midwestern town, learning to ride my older sister’s blue and green, Dutch style bike, was one of my early experiences of a connection to the bigger world around me. Helping my own children learn to bike, gave that powerful sensation, so much a metaphor for my painting process, of chaos and control; support and release; running alongside and letting go. Bike riding contains an exhilarating and challenging combination of physical and mental focus, agility and balance. It can be the beginning of agency, self-reliance and broadening access to exploring the breadth of the world on your own steam.
A Dutch friend told me that my work was just like Holland; the place my ancestors emigrated from in the late 1800s. My parents travelled there extensively and loved sharing stories about the art and the landscape. Having never been there, my first, recent, trip to the Netherlands was a ‘coming home’ to a compositional structure in my paintings that has been a part of my way of seeing since I was a small child. Houses on street level with big window views right into sitting rooms and kitchens, straight through the living space from front yard flower pots to backyard gardens.
The cohesive cycling and transit infrastructure in Holland with green space, gardens and art as an integral part of the commute and affordable access for all citizens to rural and urban centers, is an easy fit into my Urban Garden landscapes and has brought back those early feelings of agency, access, balance and possibility.
Bicycles and Gardens