Heidi began painting watercolours en plein air in her mid teens. She continues to paint the great Canadian landscape in watercolour and oil on Georgian Bay summers and intermittently anywhere else in the world on her painting trips. She has spent a year in Japan studying pottery and remains a devoted part time ceramist.

Heidi has been an enthusiastic educator with the Toronto District School Board for 30 years. She has in that time completed nine large murals commissioned by Scarborough Public Schools as well as set designs and paintings for various drama productions.

A member of the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour, the Heliconian Club and Riverdale Artwalk.

Heidi lives in Toronto. She has painted in the United States, Mexico, the Caribbean and Europe as well as Canada.

Thrillseeking around the World

Landscape is a word that evokes gentle pastorals from Romantic European tradition in Canada, it means something else. The rough power of our geography excites the sensibilities of the jaded eye. West to East, South to North, presents a varied drama that has compelled most Canadian Artists to face the landscape.

For me it started around the area of the Grand River at Doon, living in Homer Watson’s House. It was a summer art school and the ghosts of many great Canadian Landscape painters haunted the halls. This developed into a lifelong quest of traveling with my paintbox as a watercolourist. My first encounter with the True North, the summer I spent in the subarctic region of Atlin, B.C., I discovered oilstick, another portable medium. Powerful and immediate, it perfectly suits the interpretations of the bare-crust-of-the-earth places I seek out.

I prefer painting on location, I like to feel the wind, smell the air, hear the rush of water, birds, echoes… I am not a studio painter. Only sometimes do I paint very large interpretations of a smaller work indoors to be practical. Mostly I like to canoe, hike, or fly to places that lay bare the grand forces of nature at work.