Before there is an image, there is an opening.

Before there is a direction, there is listening.

I enter the studio without searching for answers.

I attempt to create the conditions for something to be heard.

The work emerges from that encounter.

Painting is how I listen to what wants to come into being.

—

Sheri Paisley creates atmospheric paintings rooted in the shifting landscapes of the Pacific coast. Her work begins with photographic references gathered through direct observation of fog, wind, water, and changing light.

These reference images serve as a point of departure rather than a destination. In the studio, Paisley works intuitively, allowing each painting to move beyond its source material and gradually unfold into abstraction. Layers of colour, texture, and gesture accumulate over time as forms dissolve, reappear, and transform.

Sometimes the work loosely suggests specific places, and other times it moves fully into abstraction, becoming visually unrecognizable yet still strangely familiar. These paintings hold the experience of weather as it is felt rather than seen. Fog gathers and breaks. Light arrives and withdraws. Distance becomes both physical and emotional.

The work invites a slower way of looking, where recognition is partial and meaning unfolds over time. What emerges is not a fixed image, but a shifting field of atmosphere, memory, and perception.

—

Sheri Paisley (Bakes) is a Canadian painter living and working on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. She received a BFA from the Emily Carr University in 1998, and began exhibiting with the Bau-Xi Gallery in 2002 and the Foster/White Gallery in Seattle in 2004. She since went on to show in New York, Los Angeles, and throughout Europe.

Sheri Paisley’s work explores light and wind in nature and the unstable threshold between perception and atmosphere in motion. Working at the intersection of internal sensation and external landscape, she approaches painting as a site of encounter where breath, wind, and unseen forces become active agents rather than metaphors. Her abstract compositions hover between emergence and dissolution, holding tension between structure and dispersal, matter and energy.

For Paisley, painting is not representation but a form of attunement. Through charged colour, sweeping gesture, and rhythmic mark-making, she navigates the complexities of lived experience including altered perception and the limits of vision itself. Influenced by the volatile light and shifting weather systems of the Canadian West Coast, her work resists fixed imagery, instead offering fields of movement that invite sustained looking. The paintings operate as perceptual spaces / immersive environments where boundaries between self and world momentarily loosen.

Kevin Chong wrote for the Globe and Mail, "Her brooding wind-swept scenes highlight tensions not only between the sky and land, but also between the physical landscape and the world of the mind."

Larissa MacFarquhar wrote for The New Yorker Magazine, "When Sheri was young, she’d had imagery so vivid that she sometimes had difficulty distinguishing it from what was real. She painted intricate likenesses of people and animals; portraiture attracted her because she was interested in psychology. Then, when she was twenty-nine, she had a stroke, and lost her imagery altogether.

To her, the loss of imagery was a catastrophe. She felt as though her mind were a library that had burned down. She no longer saw herself as a person. Gradually, as she recovered from her stroke, she made her way back to painting, working very slowly. She switched from acrylic paints to oils because acrylics dried too fast. She found that her art had drastically changed. She no longer wanted to paint figuratively; she painted abstractions that looked like galaxies seen through a space telescope. She lost interest in psychology—she wanted to connect to the foundations of the universe."


Paisley received her BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 1998 and has exhibited internationally since 2002. in 2026 she was nominated for and won the Takao Tanabe Art Prize. She lives and works on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Her work has been shown in Europe, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Toronto, and Vancouver, and is held in numerous private and public collections across North America and Europe, including Emaar Properties (Dubai), Toronto Dominion Bank, UBC Psychiatric Hospital, Vancouver General Hospital, St. Paul’s Hospital (Vancouver), Swedish Hospital (Seattle), and Overlake Hospital (Bellevue).

Please contact the Bau-Xi Gallery in Vancouver and Toronto, as well as the Foster/White Gallery in Seattle for more information.
* All inquiries will be forwarded to these galleries.