BIOGRAPHY:
Based in Gibsons on British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast, Mary-Jean Butler creates oil paintings that distill the rugged grandeur of the Pacific Northwest into intimate visual meditations. Her practice—shaped by a formal background in both Fine Art and Graphic Design—merges bold stylization with a deep reverence for the natural world.
Working from a forested studio surrounded by the very terrain she paints, Butler engages with the mutable character of landscape: a subject seemingly solid, yet endlessly in flux. Her current body of work delves into the psychological and emotional resonances of place, where moments of tension and harmony unfold through contrasts—massive trunks against fragile leaves, dense shadows pierced by ephemeral light.
The study of contrasts between massive trunks juxtaposing the most delicate of foliage, the darkness of a heavy-handed shadow when highlighted by playful strokes of light, lies at the heart of her inquiry. Rather than depicting sweeping vistas, Butler turns her gaze inward, toward the intricacies that lie within small croppings and seasonal shifts. In these subtle transitions of form, colour, and texture, she finds a visual language for introspection—a terrain as vast and variable as the land itself.
