From her hillside studio overlooking the Roberts Creek coastline, where her grandfather Harry Roberts once milled timber for the 13 bridges of Lower Road, painter Katherine Lloyd is gingerly navigating her entrée to the fine art world.
In an age where computers and commercialism can petrify creative urges, Lloyd’s resolution channels the pioneering spirit of her ancestors.
“It seems to me that these days people are really leaning into contemporary art more than traditional painting, and artificial intelligence is coming to sweep us off our feet,” Lloyd said in an interview with Coast Reporter.
“It’s quite frightening actually. I don’t know if there’s really a career left for creative painting anymore. They have all kinds of programs out there that will produce the most beautiful painting and they’re quite imaginative as well, depending on the input given to them.”
Lloyd may be tiptoeing into the technological age, readying the launch of an online showcase of her works, but she has been painting since childhood. It all began with a passion for pointillism decades ago, she said, and a membership in the Federation of Canadian Artists.
“I sold some stuff back then,” she recalled, “but then I went back to life.”
Over the last 30 years, “life” meant building and renovating houses. She has constructed and finished some 17 properties in that period, channeling her art into three-dimensional touches like fine-hewn cedar siding.
Her appetite for self-expression through pigment never left her, however. Over the last few years, Lloyd returned to the discipline of regular painting, producing over 160 works in acrylic on canvas and hardboard.
Concerned at the gentrification of the southern Sunshine Coast, Lloyd established a secondary homestead in a rural periphery of Powell River. She splits her time between her two studios, transforming West Coast flora and fauna into bright-hued compositions. The works are framed in yellow cedar and cypress by her partner Tony.
Lloyd has a particular fascination with ravens, which she believes are capable of a wide gamut of humanlike expressions. She is ambivalent about eagles, whose beaks are frozen in a downcast countenance, but paints them anyway with workmanlike resolve.
Her raven portrait Moody Blue is part of the current members’ exhibition at the Gibsons Public Art Gallery. “In this one I really got the expression,” she said. “That’s the expression of somebody that’s being bullied or picked on. That’s the feeling inside when it comes out like that.”
Sunflowers are a regular motif, either as an explosion of blossoms or as a perch for ruminating birds. Even a non-native species makes an appearance among her canvases: two elephants in silhouette meander the savannah at dusk, the mother tethered to her calf by trunk and tail. A series of bewitching nudes adorn the wall of a downstairs bathroom, painted from come-hither models in gentlemen’s magazines Lloyd purchased at rummage sales.
A tiny canvas depicts the famous Sunray House built by Harry Roberts in 1929 on Nelson Island, its angular window panes splayed into the eponymous beams.
“My goal is to paint in a way that allows the viewer to lose themselves for a moment and feel free in their own space,” said Lloyd, who is entirely self-taught. “Through the years I have amassed a large collection of work that I am only now presenting to the world.”
