Nature and art bring healing and peace for Calgary abstract mixed-media artist, Cherisse Mia

Calgary Herald

3 days ago

Roughly 12 years ago, Cherisse Mia decided she was going dedicate herself to art.
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Her children had grown up, so the self-taught Calgary artist committed herself to her practise full-time. She treated it as if she were taking art in university, buying all the books and supplies, and taking inspiration from artists such as early 20th-century Russian abstract painter Wassily Kandisnky and Austrian symbolist artist Gustav Klimt.
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She also made hundreds of sketches and set out to find her voice through trial and error.
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'I started teaching myself full-time, just dived head on,' Mia says in an interview from her booth at the Western Oasis Art Show at the BMO Centre. 'I did painting every day for three years.'
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In 2017, she applied to get in to the Western Oasis Art Show, the annual Calgary Stampede gathering of dozens of artists. She didn't get in, so she opted to set up a booth on Stephen Avenue near the Calgary Convention Centre, which had a street market set up during the Stampede.
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She caught the attention of someone who worked at the convention centre, who gave her a window to display her art. She eventually sold pieces to the centre.
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In 2018, Mia was accepted into the Stampede art show and has attended every year since.
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There is a certain irony that her first major sale would be in the heart of downtown Calgary.
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A mixed-media artist who uses natural materials such as fossils and gemstones — including plenty of Alberta ammolite — to create abstract landscapes, the natural world has always been central to Mia's work as subject matter, inspiration and as a way to create organic textures.
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Her often large-scale paintings — which Mia sells throughout North America — are a bit of an outlier compared to much of the art at the Western Oasis, a testament to the ever-expanding definition of western or cowboy art.
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A recent work, a seven-by-three-foot textured landscape, which she calls Elements of Alberta, is a mountain scene using white and muted colours. The bottom half is made up of 50 layers of paint, with gemstones and fossils embedded into it.
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'I feel like nature gave me the gift of giving me the idea to put fossils and gemstones onto the art because I was always out hunting for rocks, and now I go down to the river and hunt for ammolite in southern Alberta,' she says.