Artist Lorne Winters captures a range of subjects in his captivating paintings
BY JULIE GEDEON
Driving along a country road, artist Lorne Winters once spotted bales of hay in a misty field that looked so serene he had to stop. “There wasn’t even a bird chirping,” he recalls. “I kept taking pictures until the mist lifted and some of the natural noises returned about a half-hour later.”
Back at his studio in Glen Williams in the Halton Hills, Winters found a myriad of angles, colours, shapes and lighting to depict the hay bales in a series of oil paintings now being enjoyed by their respective owners.
“I want people to experience the beauty that I feel when I’m originally inspired and when I’m recapturing that beauty in my painting,” Winters says. “It’s so nice when buyers say they sit down with a cup of coffee or a glass of wine to gaze at one of my landscapes and actually feel themselves decompress.”
Conveying the exquisiteness of a landscape or something as simple as the way a pub chair throws its shadows gives Winters a wide artistic breadth. He typically works on four or five paintings at once so that he’s not waiting for the oils to dry, and each work progresses at a comfortable pace that retains his interest.
His colour palettes lend themselves to the warmth of home decor, and a number of clients own multiple paintings in his various genres. “A casual viewer doesn’t necessarily notice that they’re all by me,” he says, “although I think there’s a common undercurrent when you look more closely.”
Winters began drawing as a child. His uncle, an animator, suggested that he attend Central Technical School where art would be progressively integrated into his high school education. “My parents drove me from Mississauga to my grandmother’s house in Toronto every Sunday night, and I returned home on Friday evenings,” he recalls. “It was great. My grandmother definitely spoiled me.”
After graduation, he learned a lot by working for other studio artists for a couple of years, and then struck out on his own. “For the next 20 years, I worked as a freelance artist from my home studio on all of the big Toronto accounts, including Coca-Cola, Nike, Canadian Tire and Labatt,” he says. “I worked with some brilliant people and took pride and pleasure in making even the simplest illustration the best I could. But the business changed, becoming a lot more price-competitive – and I had always intended to get more into the fine arts side.”
Winters has applied the self-discipline that he acquired as a commercial artist to his current practice. He works between eight and 10 hours a day, six days a week at his rustic studio inside a former mill (now a heritage building) overlooking a forest. “There’s just so much I still want to learn and do,” he says. “Besides, it’s doesn’t feel like work to me. Art is not so much what I do, but who I am. I just love painting.”
Every fresh canvas presents a new challenge. “In my figurative paintings, I try to capture the human spirit … a model’s quiet moment of inner reflection,” he says.
A lover of all arts, he contacted a dance studio to photograph the performers back stage for a series that depicts the moments that audiences don’t normally see. When he decided to paint equine images, he contacted the owner of a nearby horse farm. “When something interests me, I find the people and places that can help me to artistically explore it,” he says.
Winters’s wife, Christine, persuaded him to begin teaching groups of four at his studio 18 months ago. “During the first class, I basically go step by step through the process of painting a still life so they have a good foundation in the techniques and language that I use, and then we move onto other subjects,” he says. “When I see that light – that sparkle – in one of their eyes, it’s so gratifying to know that I’ve passed along some of my knowledge.”
He regularly opens his studio to sell the small canvases that he often does to hone an image before investing in a larger piece. “It’s a way to get beautiful paintings into the hands of people who perhaps have less money,” he says. “I don’t believe art should be just for the wealthy.”
Although he’s busy keeping up with the demand for his paintings and classes, Winters hopes to find time to explore more of Canada. “It’s such a beautiful country,” he says. “It would be really nice to depict more of it in paintings.”
