Rachelle Kearns

Rachelle Kearns doesn’t have a Texas drawl – yet. The artist moved several months ago from Toronto to Austin when her husband began work with a tech start-up. She continues to paint and ship her work back to Canadian galleries.

Kearns, who studied art at the University of Toronto, has been painting full time for about a decade. She says her artistic voice began to develop around the same time, as she explored how sunlight dances on water and fractures into beams when it shines through a verdant forest. She later moved the theme indoors to explore light from glowing chandeliers. 

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Rachelle Kearns, "Fireworks #1", 2015, acrylic on board, 24” x 18”

Rachelle Kearns,"Fireworks #1", 2015, acrylic on board,24” x 18”

“I am mesmerized by beautiful moments – not just because of the aesthetics, but because it stirs my soul and allows me to experience something beyond myself, something far greater than my own reality,” Kearns writes in her artist statement. “These moments feel like inspired glimpses of truth and they are only found when I pause long enough to take them in.”

Kearns recently started to paint fireworks, creating little bursts of polka-dotted colour that captured some of her emotions as she left Toronto. “It felt like everything was blowing up in my life,” she says. Still, rather than feeling sad that friends and family are far away, she’s trying to embrace the adventure. And Texas, she notes, has one major compensation: “The weather is gorgeous.” 

Rachelle Kearns is represented by the Gibson Art Gallery in Calgary and the Assiniboia Gallery in Regina. Her work sells for $1,000 to $5,000.