Canadian painter, Meghan Hildebrand was born in 1978 in Whitehorse, Yukon. She went on to study art in Nelson, B.C. at the Kootenay School of the Arts, and later in Halifax, at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. In 2004, Meghan moved to Powell River, a historical mill town on B.C.’s Sunshine Coast. She has, in the ensuing years, become an integral part of Powell River’s thriving artist’s community.
Over the course of her career to date, Meghan Hildebrand has developed a personal library of symbols. This iconography finds its way into her landscape paintings, which she sometimes refers to as “landscape-exploded.” This is the place where her personal symbols come to mingle and converse. Her guiding principle is to start each painting differently. When describing her painting process, she explains, “My painting practice is ‘intuitive’….. (my) paintings have no set design, instead, I take my cues from the first random strokes, washes and collage items.”
Hildebrand’s recent interest in creating works of a monumental scale has dictated a move away from wooden panels, in favour of large-scale canvases. Light and flexible canvas can be stretched to almost any size! Meghan likes to work on multiple canvases, often replacing brushstrokes with collage, representing fragments of time and space. The acrylic & collage underpainting is finished with oil glazes. Her sunny Powell River studio is a tornado of paper scraps, paint, tools, books, sewing and music.
Meghan Hildebrand’s work is collected across Canada and world-wide.