An exhibition of mixed-media works by one of the Sunshine Coast’s most active art instructors will culminate mid-month at the Gibsons Public Market. For painter Sheri Peters, the vision for such a collection of ethereal portrayals doesn’t come into focus until the canvases themselves are completed.
“I don’t actually see the end result in my head,” Peters said, “it’s not a planned action. I start with an idea of what I’m doing, lay down some shapes, play with some colours and figure out what I like. Then I just kind of let it be.”
Peters offers regular workshops, lessons and painting parties in addition to her own artistic practice.
Drawing on years spent living around the globe (with an extended period in Nicaragua), her abstracts are simultaneously rooted in the natural world and the vortex of human emotions. In her Heron in My Dreams, the bird rests on impossibly slender legs atop a stone whose contours dissolve into a background of dreamy seascape. The heron’s body and its rocky perch share a scheme of mottled blue and gold, communicating the wistful evanescence of watercolours through a combination of acrylics and collage. The eagle’s head of In Sight, rendered with golden paints, is composed of pinwheeling strokes that combine rapacious intensity with cosmic whorls. Her painting Fleeting Memories, depicting a bird riding an updraft, similarly employs a fiddlehead motif at the periphery of teal-infused feathers. The work was the recipient of the People’s Choice award at the 2024 Sunshine Coast Art and Words Festival, where it was paired with a poem by Pammila Ruth.
“The heart of most of my artwork is a sort of sense of peace and touching something beyond the physical,” Peters explained. “You can’t see it, but it is very much part of us and central to us as human beings.”
Her imagining of each work is a personally transformative process that unfolds gradually through the image’s development. In the case of her recently completed series of five canvases titled It Begins and Ends With Love, it began with five tiny sketches and evolved over 12 months. Once Peters recognized thematic links between the individual drawings, she united them by adding common abstract forms in the backgrounds. “It all came together,” she observed of the panels, which depict human figures navigating turbid relationships between fellow creatures and divine forces.
Peters’s approach to the mixed-media format prioritizes the creation of physical textures; she occasionally uses glass beads or molding paste in combination with collage materials. She favours acrylic paint, mixed down into glazes to create translucent layers. Experimentation in the interest of self-expression is integral to her work, and something that she encourages in her workshops. “I feel like I learn a lot from the participants that come,” she observed, “not only what they enjoy, but also through building community. A special part of being an artist is you have this ability to communicate in a way that’s beyond words.”
While lighter-than-air motifs flutter through many of Peters’s avian abstracts, she is planning a new series of works inspired by horses — and intends to continue the evolution of her colour palette in directions influenced by the Sunshine Coast shoreline.
Peters maintains an active Instagram presence at @sheri_peters_abstract_painter; her works remain on display at the Gibsons Public Market until Feb. 16.
