Grace Lane-Smith
Grace is an oil/mixed media artist crafting whimsical portals with an old-world vibe to the ocean from the shores of Nova Scotia. Her art is inspired by the vastness of the ocean and how it makes her feel swept up in something big. Her work translates the calming, soul-satisfying feelings she gets on canvas so others can experience it anywhere in the world. She enjoys standing at the edge where tide and beach meet, tasting sea salt spray on her tongue. This gets her out of her head to live in the moment and feel refreshed.
Her earliest memories are of wandering up and down the aisles of a gallery on weekends, stopping in front of each painting and experiencing a feeling of ‘falling’ into the world each piece presented. This is what she aims to do with her own work. Grace’s art recreates that magical sense of inspiring and lifting viewers out of their busy (usually glued-to-the-screen digital) lives, to experience the peace of seeing seafoam rush up a beach, even if it is through a painting hanging in a city home.
Grace takes many pictures when she walks along the coast. While these serve as reference material, her work is described to look more like a dream world, which uplift both mind and spirit.
Grace’s approach to education has always been unconventional. Instead of art school, she built her own education program by painting, talking with working artists, taking mentorship programs, workshops, and reading. She has been on the other side of teaching by volunteering as a docent and running workshops while managing art store operations in the busy city of Toronto, ON. As of August 2022, Grace is pursuing a goal to study classical drawing through an atelier program.
When a brain injury sidelined her career in Toronto, Grace took to coping and recovering with painting landscapes and waterscapes, selling her first works in-person and online. Featured in provincial publications and group shows online and in person, her art has been commissioned and collected across Canada and the United States. Grace works from her home studio, creating and shipping art to collectors as well as having her art represented online at Artterra and in a couple galleries in Nova Scotia.