These twenty Art Cards, representative of my Neighbourhood, Urban Garden and recent Urban Bicycle and Garden paintings, have been beautifully reproduced and curated into four different sets of art cards. These packages of cards are available for purchase through the Card Shop, or to use as a group fundraising tool.
As an artist, my focus in this project has been to work with photographers and designers to translate these large-scale paintings into a smaller format, making high quality reproductions of my work that can be collected and gifted as cards.
As a parent of three arts-involved children and as a community organizer, I know the challenges of raising funds for non-profit organizations and community programs. I believe these paintings are a wonderful expression of community connectivity, that can be used for nurturing and supporting organizations in successful and meaningful fundraising campaigns.
Learn more about fundraising using my art cards.
“Jill Thomson’s paintings are views of urban environments and interiors of both public and private spaces such as cafes, libraries, brownstones and homes and as the paintings’ surfaces increase in size so the images absorb more houses, their street – the entire neighbourhood. The paintings have become deconstructed views of a house in a setting – its content and its inhabitants simultaneously revealed through multiple planes on a single surface.
A western viewer, particularly an urban person, recognizes the architectural vernacular of the old, Chicago-style neighbourhoods, their bungalows and four-squares – their brick facades – the same architecture Jill brings up to the surface to reveal both the structure and its interior. This shared visual language between artist and audience heightens the metaphoric and narrative possibilities of these works and reflects back to the viewer her own relationship to place and time.”
Heather Hamel, Scott Gallery, Edmonton
I have been a visual artist for almost forty years and my paintings have always been an exploration of figure and ground with complex interior and exterior spatial relationships, influenced deeply by helping to build a house designed by my parents on an island near Montreal. The passive solar house, captured their passion for architecture and design in ancient and contemporary landscapes with an openness to the surrounding forest and a fluid connection between garden and home. My partner and I are grateful to have built our own house with our family in Edmonton with a studio on the main level, raised bed gardens and a woodworking shop. We can walk or ride our bikes past community gardens, through ravine wilderness to local theatres, shops and markets. My paintings communicate this value for human-centred design and connectivity in cities.
Growing up in a small Midwestern town, learning to ride my older sister’s blue and green, Dutch style bike (a few sizes too big for me) 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 centres, is an easy fit into my Urban Garden landscapes and has brought back those early feelings of agency, access, balance and possibility. These paintings in their compositional structure celebrate private and communal living spaces with an integrated city design of ‘within walking and cycling distance’ pathways to local business, markets, farms and wild spaces. I hope you enjoy these cards as much as I have enjoyed creating them.
About my Work
Bicycle/Garden Design in Cities
Neighbourhoods
Urban Gardens 2
Urban Gardens 1
