Biography

  Carol Parafenko is a self-taught artist with a background in graphic design, publishing, professional photography and art history. in 2007 after a 30-year absence from the field, she pledged to return to her love of painting, picked up a brush, and started painting once again. The subject matter of her paintings are the landscapes, people and street scenes of the communities where she lives, works, and plays — Brant, Guelph, Wellington, Lambton and Algonquin — captured in rich colour and brushwork. The scenes portrayed in her paintings all have a special significance in her life.

  Artists Tom Thomson, Lawren Harris, Claude Monet, J.M.W. Turner and Winslow Homer have all inspired her. A special moment of illumination was the 2002 exhibition of Tom Thomson's sketches and paintings at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

  Carol Parafenko loves portraying the poetry of light and the changing of the seasons; quiet moments in the natural world. She particularly enjoys the medium of oil painting because it allows not only visual enrichment for the viewer and the artist, but a synesthesis as well.