Artists

Clare Thorbes is a Yukon-born visual artist. She studied drawing and oil painting with Glenn Howarth, RCA. Clare completed her first large-scale narrative paintings at the Victoria College of Art and graduated with a Diploma in Fine Art in 2003.

Her first corporate sale of a major figurative painting came in 2009, following her move to Nova Scotia. Her home base is now in Ottawa, where she is focusing on narrative animal art, pet portraiture and landscape painting.

Her keen interest in all the arts led her to explore various musical instruments as well as singing and dancing. Clare’s background includes translation, book publishing, and editing.

KJ Scott is a Canadian contemporary painter based in Ottawa, Ontario. Her lifelong relationship with art began in a family that embraced creativity in all its forms, making, music, and constant engagement with the arts. This early exposure established a deep-rooted understanding of the value of artistic expression and its role in shaping how we see the world.
Over the past forty years, Scott has studied at various art schools, earning a Fine Art degree from the University of Guelph and continuing her education in illustration, interior and graphic design, and metalsmithing. Her career in marketing for the visual and performing arts kept her close to the creative world and always supporting from the sidelines. Returning full-time to painting marks a reclaiming of her earliest passion.
Scott’s work explores the tension between humanity’s accelerating technological future and the natural world’s enduring cycles of renewal. Influenced by automatism and the fringes of surrealism, she creates imagined characters and fluid, dreamlike environments that question our evolving relationship with creativity, destruction, and rebirth. Her process is rooted in a state of “flow” - both a psychological immersion and a technical approach carried over from her years working with molten silver. Working in acrylics, she begins each piece with a seed of intention, allowing the materials to guide her as imagery unfolds through an intuitive conversation with the canvas.
Travel, often done simply and close to the ground, has shaped her appreciation for human complexity and the diverse ways we interact with our environments. These experiences, combined with her belief in the irreplaceable nature of human imagination, inform her ongoing exploration of what it means to create and to persist, as the world around us transforms.