Deborah Bakos is a photo-based and abstract painter from Vancouver. She holds a Certificate of Fine Arts / Painting from Emily Carr University and a Bachelor of Education in English/Fine Arts/Media Literacy from Simon Fraser University. Deborah, a former Humanities Educator with 14 years of experience in the classroom, is a member of the all-female art collective 13 Feet Off The Ground and a founding member of the annual Parker Art Salon.

My photo-based paintings re-imagine gendered messages in media and advertising. I use photographs of women over the past century combined with paint, textiles and a little dark humour to explore and comment on hierarchies that have tipped the scales in men’s favour.  By altering the contexts of vintage and contemporary photographs, placing women centre stage, I hope to expose contradictions and further the dialogue around gender parity.

Instagram @deborah_bakos_art

Website deborahbakos.com

Morgane Billault is a freelance Animator, Illustrator and Muralist living in Vancouver BC. She was born in Nantes, France, where she studied traditional animation and fine arts at École Pivaut. Her passion for drawing and traveling brought her to Canada in 2011 where she worked in the animation industry for studios based in Montreal, Halifax and Vancouver. 

Morgane’s influences are animated features, children’s picture books and the Impressionists whom she fell in love with while working in the Musée d’Orsay. Her personal work is figurative and colourful. Her creations come to life using traditional paper animation, ink, watercolour and acrylic paint. When she started painting murals, she experienced the positive impact that public art has on a neighbourhood. She loves painting big scale illustrations that can be shared with the community every day. 

Instagram @billaultmorgane

Website morganebillault.com

Vancouver artist Jenn Brisson started her art career in Classical Animation and has since then become a prolific painter, illustrator, street artist and an international muralist. Her work is figurative and surreal; painting hybrid creatures and quasi-humanoids who live in the spaces between reality and fantasies. Jenn generally works in acrylic and spray paint, painting on traditional and non-traditional substrates, like skateboards and helicopter fuselage. Her art has been shown in galleries, comics, storybooks, and alleyways and was featured on CBC's "Crash Gallery": Season One. Currently living in Mount Pleasant, Vancouver, Jenn still works by day in the animation industry, while at night, if she’s not found in her art studio, is rocking out with her band, The Damps. 

Instagram @jennbrissonart

 Website jennbrisson.com

Rosemary Burden is a Vancouver based artist whose drawing and mixed media installation work explores the connection between art and science. She uses the notion of repetition - butterfly migration patterns, the cellular growth found in nature and computer binary language - to understand biology, mathematics and physics through art. Rosemary graduated from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2011.

Instagram @rosemaryburden

Website rosemaryburden.com

Melanie Ellery is a painter, creating lively, expressive abstract works.
After graduating from Illustration at Sheridan, she worked as a graphic designer and art director in Toronto, Ontario and Vancouver, B.C., then fully turned her focus to painting.

Melanie can be found creating vibrant, contemporary art in her Port Moody studio. Her work is process-driven, colourful and dynamic; she paints intuitively and spontaneously, expressing life, energy and joy. 
A founding member of the artist collective, ‘13 feet off the ground’’, Melanie has participated in artist residencies in Graniti, Sicily, New Mexico, USA and San José del Cabo, Mexico.

“I view my work as a journey–one filled with experimentation, discovery, joy and fulfillment. My intention is to paint intuitively, let the work go where it may and then step in to control its resolution. I aspire to make art that is uplifting and invokes joyfulness."

Instagram @elleryart

Website melanieellery.com

Angela Joelle Gooliaff has a Bachelor of Science Degree (University of Regina) and a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree (Emily Carr University of Art + Design). With a particular interest in drawing and works on paper, her practice explores parody, exaggeration and the space between comfort and discomfort.  Frequently using multiples and repetition, Gooliaff investigates society’s need to find connection and conformity, often at the cost of individuality.

Gooliaff has participated in artist residencies in Italy, France and Banff. Her work has been widely exhibited in western Canada and is included in a number of private and public collections.

Angela resides in Vancouver where she writes and illustrates children’s books. She is also an actor which includes voiceover projects for animations and video games.

Instagram @antartist

Website angelagooliaff.com

Joanne Hastie is an artist based in Vancouver BC, Canada. Her focus is using technology to be more creative. In her current work she uses robotics, programming and paint to create art.

For over a decade she worked as an R&D Engineer in various small companies while painting on evenings and weekends. She kept both careers very separate as they have very different communities and expertise.

 Joanne’s first tech-art project was with a small desktop robotic arm and she taught herself to code in Python. Joanne’s work on a painting robot earned her a 5th place in the 2018 International Robot Art competition and international press. Her latest work of Machine Learning Curation was shown at NeurIPS 2018 conference in Montreal, Canada. Joanne is currently investigating using AI with abstracts and cityscape paintings that use classification and generation processes. 

Joanne loves to travel, this led her to Graniti, Sicily in 2014 where she painted a mural. Wanting to return, she organized a larger Vancouver group of artists to paint in the same town in 2017. The group formed into 13 Feet Off the Ground

Instagram @joannehastie

Website joannehastie.com

Tannis Hopkins is an expressive, modern realism painter working primarily in oil and acrylic. She likes to explore familiar yet curious narratives and to start a story in the viewer’s mind. Her work strives to preserve the childlike sense of wonder and play in life while shadowing the darker side.  “If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, she/he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with her/him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.” Rachel Carson.

Some of Tannis’s work explores and celebrates food culture, another passion of hers. She hopes to help people recognize and appreciate how much food is part of our love of life, how it defines our cultures and brings us together. 

Through her work Tannis hopes to find kindred spirits, and to celebrate heartfelt, sensory and meaningful parts of life. She exhibits regularly and her work is in collections in Canada and the US. Tannis is thrilled to be a part of the 13 feet off the ground and the collective’s shared adventures. 

Tannis grew up in Montreal, Quebec and moved to Vancouver, BC to connect with family origins. She studied Fine Art at Dawson College and Concordia University in Montreal and Fine and Applied Arts at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto. She worked as an advertising art director/graphic designer for years and now focuses on her fine art.

Instagram @tannishopkins

 Website tannishopkins.com

Sheree Jones is an artist & oil painter in North Vancouver, BC.

She has been passionate about her art since “the age of crayons”.

An active member of the Federation of Canadian Artists, her work can be found in numerous collections around the globe.

 She leads painting workshops in her personal teaching studio & on plein air adventures both in BC and internationally (notably Spain & Mexico). A respected teacher & mentor, Sheree’s enthusiastic energy brings inspiration to all who come to work with her.

 As a member of the Vancouver artist collective “13 Feet off the Ground” she has participated in several projects. These projects began with a month long artist residency in Sicily in 2017, and to date have included several collaborative murals and group exhibitions both in Canada and Mexico.

Instagram @shereejonesfineart

Website shereejones.com

Alison Keenan Keenan lived in Burma before returning home to England to complete her art education and later lived in Italy and Egypt where she studied Aubusson and Gobelin Tapestry. In 2008, she graduated from Emily Carr University and in 2010, she received a Certificate in Liberal Arts from Simon Fraser University.

Her portfolio includes national and international exhibitions, an online catalogue, guest speaker, artist’s residences and videos.

Keenan’s new paintings and large murals continue her in-depth exploration on the theme of Avian Fables where in collage or paint she envisions surreal imaginary stories.  Scale is often arbitrary and non-perspective and the difference between the characters depicted as birds and humans are fanciful. Keenan explores engaging stories in the surreal bodies of land and water found on the shoreline while aided by avian guides, the harbingers of seasonal and environmental changes.

Instagram @alisonkeenanart

Twitter @AlisonKeenanArt

 Website alisonkeenanpaintings.com

Painter/Printmaker/Art Podcaster Carol McQuaid loves the contemplation involved in capturing a scene. She works on location, carrying her watercolor sketchbook journals on her travels wherever she goes. She is the author of “On Keeping a Watercolour Sketchbook Journal“ and is a huge proponent of sketching as a way to wake up and really see the world around us. 

 She divides her time between her studios in San Jose Del Cabo, Mexico and Apex Mountain, BC taking her sketches and turning them into large scale watercolors, acrylic paintings and hand carved a relief prints. Most of her subject matter centers on the interplay of time and place, our built environment and how we inhabit it.

 Carol is a Signature Member of the Federation of Canadian Artists, with her “Rooftops of Montmartre” linocut/watercolor winning first place in their 2015 Landscape Show. She’s a self-professed artist in residence junkie, Spending a good portion of each year traveling, teaching and creating art in interesting locations all over the world.

 Throughout her travels Carol takes time to connect with local artists, hosting the popular “Two Artists Walk into a Bar” podcast featuring conversations with creative about their work, life and the creative process. Yes, in a bar.

 Follow Carol’s adventures through social media, and stay tuned for new works, shows and workshops by signing up for her quarterly newsletters on her website.

Instagram @carolmcquaidart

Website carolmcquaidart.com

Podcast website twoartistswalkintoabar.com

Lori Popadiuk spent her childhood in Vancouver trolling the alleys with her Granddad looking for cast-off materials to make cool things with. Her creative path began at this early age and eventually led her to study fine art and interior design at Kwantlen Polytechnic University and the British Columbia Institute of Technology. By uniting the two crafts she gained wide recognition within the design world, mainly for her body of work Birch.

Lori’s pieces are about experimenting with the process more than the content or imagery. Her work stems from spontaneity and using her emotions as a spring board. Each painting starts out as a free flowing movement using ink & gesso then evolves into something specific, like wings or feathers and sometimes its more abstract. Lori uses painting as a way to process life experiences, in truth it is the conduit to her sanity. Lori has been exploring black and white materials exclusively since 2015. She notes the absence of colour gives solace to the simplicity and draws attention to what the viewer is ready to see, be it the light or the dark, the positive or the negative, the chaos or the calm. 

Lori has exhibited her work internationally and can be found in collections all over the world.

Instagram @loripopart

 Website loripop.com