Tamara Campbell – Abstract Artist
Bringing order to the chaos of life.
Tamara is an abstract artist working primarily in mixed media. Her studio is located in her home which is nestled in the woods outside of Burnstown, Ontario. Her paintings are bold, colourful and full of details. She is inspired by nature with its abundance of colours, textures and forms; these details emerge through the many layers that build upon each other as she creates her paintings.
She works in collections and the main one that has captured her attention lately deals with creation, destruction and re-creation involving the give and take of letting go of control and taking control through a number of different steps. Tamara creates five large abstract paintings using a chosen palette, photographs the details in them that speak to her and then she turns the paintings face down (so she can’t get precious with those parts) and cuts them into strips of varying widths. The 90 or so resulting strips from the paintings are then mixed together and reassembled into new, colourful assemblages.
These pieces are a combination of the chaos of abstract and the meticulous order of their arrangement. She has experimented with art since she was a child, and as an adult she has taken a wide variety of art courses in many different mediums. In the early 80s, she studied Photographic Arts at Ryerson in Toronto (now Toronto Metropolitan University). Her unique style blends playful creativity and experimentation with learned techniques.
Tamara’s life experiences, both wonderful and difficult, inform her perspective. She uses art as a process to search for peace, happiness and healing within herself. Her goal as an artist is to create art that provides a visual escape for her viewers – a place to get happily lost in the details.
Tamara was actively showing her paintings in Ottawa in the early 2000s. When she became a grandmother in 2010, this slowed down somewhat but since 2022, she has been showing again and is working as a full time artist. Tamara is a juried member of the Kanata Civic Art Gallery and the Carleton Place Art Hub Gallery, as well, she participates in multiple juried shows yearly and has had a number of solo shows in various venues. She has works held in private collections in Canada, the United States, New Zealand, England and Ecuador.
Instagram: instagram.com/tamara_h_campbell
Facebook: facebook.com/tamara_h_campbell_art/
Email: tamarahcampbell@gmail.com
