Vera Hand Gallery

VERA HAND

Vera's website is: www.mts.net/~vhand

Profile
Vera Hand’s preferred medium is pastel which allows a wide range of effect from soft and delicate to bold and dramatic.

Her love of nature is seen in her work with particular emphasis on those objects on which Time has worked its fullest effect. Rendered in all lights and in every season, her prairie landscapes, wild flowers and animal studies reveal the artist's optimism and joy in the enduring silence, strength and beauty of nature.

Artist’s Statement
During Manitoba’s Centennial Year, I gave myself a goal of touring the less travelled roads in search of sights that would depict a forgotten time. I have not the words to describe what I felt as I stepped inside a crumbling one room schoolhouse, an abandoned railway station or a tiny country church. I could almost hear the pump organ and the choir, the teacher’s voice in the schoolroom and the happy sounds of folks greeting friends on the deserted railway platform. And as I stood in silence in front of an old farm house, I imagined those who had once loved, laughed and lived within its now weakened walls.

Creativity, whether it be painting, music, sculpture, or writing, has a magical ministration of its own when one combines the use of the mind with the hands. One cannot ignore the peripheral pleasures; the dignity of discipline, and the orderliness of one step at a time.

It is awe inspiring, often challenging and rightfully humbling, to sit before a piece of paper and discover the elastic inventiveness that snaps into being when one allows imagination to flow freely. New vistas, new horizons, new understandings of ourselves and others pop up like crocuses in the spring and in that quiet moment, a nearness to the greatest Creator of All.

Through my work, I strive to lay warm against cool, a suggestion of human companionship against a muted sense of isolation, yet never to forget that it is first and foremost, a humbly observed and then sensitively painted work. I would like to think it is a human document as well as a loving depiction of the harmony of man and nature.

Vera Hand