Erica Hawkes
Erica Hawkes, a contemporary painter from Kelowna, British Columbia, is known for her warm, modern landscape paintings: colourful scenes rendered in geometric shapes and lines. Her works express a distinct aesthetic in their vistas, luminous colours, and boldly contoured shapes.
Erica Hawkes - New Horizons
Date and place of birth
Born in 1975, Erica Hawkes grew up in the countryside of Prince George in northern BC, surrounded by space and nature. Today, she lives in Kelowna, in the beautiful Okanagan Valley with her husband and two children.
Background and career
Erica studied design at the Colorado Institute of Art in Denver, Colorado. Years later, she furthered her education in Vancouver, BC, with a degree in fashion design. Over the last 20 years, she has worked in book illustration, portraiture, art education, and photography. She has worked in a variety of mediums including graphite, watercolor, India ink, and oil, and has finally settled into acrylic. Hawkes, however, is well known for her landscape paintings – colourful scenes rendered in geometric shapes and lines. She now works full time as a gallery artist and is currently represented in galleries across Canada.
Work and art
Largely self-taught, Erica owes her unique style to a variety of influences. Her main body of work is painted in a style she has dubbed «Nouveau 7 », which pays tribute to Canada’s own Group of Seven. She is also inspired by the organic flowing lines of the Art Nouveau movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and she has an affinity for Cubism and Japanese minimalism. These qualities give Erica’s landscapes a modern contemporary feel with nostalgic glimpses of the past.
Erica Hawkes's works express a distinct aesthetic in their vistas, luminous colours, and boldly contoured shapes. Rolling mountains, billowing clouds and reflective expanses of water are captured through sharply angular or elegantly sinuous fields of colour. Hawkes' paintings emit their own inherent glow that immediately draws and captures the viewer's attention.
Hawkes strives to bring her passion for nature and the beauty that surrounds us into each work;
“ I want the detail to add to, not take away from, each painting, so for me a little less is more. I focus more on the balance of light and dark and the overall harmony in each painting. I do my best to capture the viewer with strong colours and shapes. My aim is to draw your eyes to and around the painting, hopefully eliciting a feeling of peace or happiness at a remember moment in time. "
Erica Hawkes is represented by the Au P'tit Bonheur Art Gallery since March 2020, exclusively for Quebec.
