2023-2024 Season

Barb Jost is an award winning artist

She currently lives in Vancouver and is a member of the Vancouver Art Guild.
Barb is primarily a plein air painter working mostly in oils and gouache.  She exhibits in shows around Vancouver and online.  Barb paints in the impressionist style having found her love of painting from the Old Master Impressionist painters.

She loves being outside and draws great inspiration from nature.  Barb always takes her paints with her when she travels, hoping for painting opportunities.  Many of Barb’s paintings are small and intimate.  The small paintings can tell a large story and Barb has many stories she wants to paint.

Carolyn Bell began her work as a painter with a series of traditional and modern icons, drawings, and watercolours. Her modern icon series ranges from jazz legends like Blossom Dearie, to Canadian writers Jane Rule and Margaret Atwood, New York writer Fran Leibowitz, philosopher Michel Foucault, and legends the likes of Amy Winehouse, Bette Midler, Dusty Springfield, Julia Child and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

While Carolyn has exhibited in venues around Vancouver, (The Havana Gallery, Full Bloom Flowers to name a couple) most of her exhibits have occurred on Gabriola Island where she now lives. She has participated in the Gabriola Art’s Council’s Thanksgiving tour, exhibited with Deborah Dallyn at the Free Spirit Gallery, the group show, “Salon” at the GAC venue, joint studio exhibits with Elizabeth Shefrin, and solo shows at The Hive and the Gabriola Health Centre to name a few.

I will create a series of abstract paintings that resonate with some of the themes embedded in Dorothy Dittrich’s sung-through musical “When We Were Singing”: alienation, what is home, denial/addiction, longing, authenticity, deflection, the city as an entity.

I am planning a series of icons that include the traditional 24K gold halo of musical theatre legends with such luminaries as Bernadette Peters, Patti LuPone, Audra McDonald, and Stephen Sondheim.