Leah Dockrill, S.C.A. has been a painter for twenty-five years, a good deal of the time while working in other professions. In 1995 she left the practice of law and has been painting full-time ever since. Her art education has included courses at the University of Alberta, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Tanenbaum School and the Toronto School of Art.

She is an elected member of both the Society of Canadian Artists (since 2000) and the Ontario based Colour and Form Society (2007). She has participated in many juried, group and invitational exhibitions since 1997 and exhibited her work in a solo show in 1998 at the Scarborough Arts Council, Bluffs Gallery, Toronto. Some of her still life images have been published by a Montreal-based publisher of greeting cards, Pierre Belvedere, Inc., and a series of cattle paintings was published in, and as cover art of, two international dairy industry magazines.

Her media of choice are acrylic on canvas and watercolour on paper and she paints in a realistic style, using traditional painting techniques and usually in large scale. Leah travels as much as possible, most often to the southwestern states and to the Atlantic provinces, both regions offering limitless inspiration for her landscape paintings. In addition to natural landscape and urban landscape, her preferred subjects are floral and still life.

Artist's Statement:

There I stand, at land’s end, not so sure-footed on slippery shale, surrounded by primordial boulders in extraordinary colours. All my senses are engaged. The wind is up, the waves are crashing, sea foam is flying. I can taste and smell the tang of the ocean, and whichever way I turn, I am able to frame, in my lens and in my mind, a breathtaking image.

Some time later I will stand in my studio, facing a big blank canvas, with brush in hand. The process of liberating the stored mental images of that singular, sensual experience, is as unique in painting as the activity of standing on the shore, drinking in my surroundings. Unlike still life, in which I must contrive a composition of objects, or portraiture, in which it is crucial to adhere to the features of the sitter, painting the natural world gives me limitless artistic license, which is exhilarating. My objective is not to paint every rock with all its scars and fissures, just so, but to reflect my impressions at the time I stood ankle-deep in beach debris. If I can convey at least some of that, I consider myself blessed.