In our second pairing of the year, we are pleased to showcase Catherine McAvity and Riki Kuropatwa.

While Catherine’s paintings incorporate unique shapes in brilliantly rich arrays of colour, inspired by still life and the beautiful Vancouver Island lanscapes, where she resides, Riki’s work depicts figures and the human dynamic as they interact with mementos, heirlooms and everyday objects. Her figurative approach manages to capture emotions and character in impeccable and often comedic ways.

Catherine McAvity’s portfolio has been shaped by a lifelong interest in the formal tenets of painting, balanced by a deep, intuitive understanding of place and subject. She continuously explores the presence and character of specific landscapes, uncovering the nature of vista, forest, water, trees, flowers, and foliage. Informed by the study and appreciation of art history, Catherine’s work revitalizes the genres of landscape and still life as she brings a personal lens and perspective to her paintings.

Catherine attended the Banff School of Fine Arts in 1969. She then pursued a Bachelor of Arts from the University of British Columbia from 1969-1971, followed by a Fine Arts degree from the University of Calgary from 1971-1975. She attended the prestigious Emma Lake Workshops and the related Triangle Workshops in upper state New York in the 1980s several times. Her work has been exhibited in private and public galleries from the early 1980s, and her paintings can be found in many corporate and public collections across Canada.

Originally from Winnipeg, Riki Kuropatwa now calls Edmonton home. Primarily a figurative painter, her work explores human dynamics and always has a strong narrative component. For the past several years Riki has been teaching pre-service teachers how to teach art at the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta. She has exhibited her work in several galleries across Canada and is in many private collections. Riki obtained her Master of Fine Art from York University, her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Manitoba, and her Bachelor of Education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto.

Her recent paintings centre around our social interactions and gathering places, also known as ‘third spaces’, those places that are neither home nor work. In an increasingly virtual world, our third spaces are under pressure to maintain their purpose and viability, the public gallery space is of critical importance to the well-being of the people it serves.

My work invites the viewer to enter the work and take an active role in building the narrative(s) and meaning and often elicits personal stories and reflections. I am interested in the interior and exterior lives of people. I have always been a keen observer of human behaviour and am endlessly interested in the way we look at and move through the world. My paintings are an exploration and a love letter to that which makes us human, with particular interest in our shared spaces. Another area I explore in my work is people’s relationships to the significant objects in their life, which sparked my interest in Thing Theory, a branch of critical theory that explores the relationships humans have with objects, both practical and aesthetic. I present people gathered, listening, talking, reacting, or deeply lost in their own thoughts. I am interested in a wide variety of people, with particular attention to older adults, who are less often less visible in art.