Grand Prize Winner of the TWAC Juried Art Exhibit at the CNE 2017
Featured Artist of the Month
March 2018, September 2017
CHRISTINE MONTAGUE
Christine Montague creates realist oil paintings with the polar bear central to themes of tribute, solitude without loneliness, hope, wonder and concern. Christine’s artist studio is in New Toronto.
Read Christine’s Blog Post “Not All Rewards Are Financial” HERE
CHRISTINE’S WEBSITE
Biography
Christine Montague was born in Montreal, Quebec.
Always a drawer, not a scrap of paper in Christine ’s childhood home was left untouched. Christine drew, drew, drew her way through school (yes, she was the classroom artist), a B.Sc. Biology, a B.F.A. Studio Art, a move to Toronto, and a commercial art job there. At Ontario College of Art (Communication and Design) she drew from life and her imagination, in her studio, at school, and en plein air.
Christine began painting in oils when she owned an open studio in an artist co-op she helped to create, and continued to do so when she relocated her open studio to the Williams Mill Visual Arts Centre. Subject matter was inspired by that she felt closest to, and her children often served as models for her figurative landscapes. Themes of solitude without loneliness, and summer escape in the Canadian landscape emerged.
Her paintings were exhibited in over fifty art shows, many of them juried. Her art earned awards at such annual juried art shows as Arts Etobicoke, Beaux-Arts Brampton, and Oakville Artworks. She also received numerous portrait oil painting commissions, notably Dr. Oscar Peterson (Living Arts Centre, Mississauga).
In 2012, polar bears were listed as a species of special concern, and so out of concern, as well as tribute, Christine painted her first polar bear painting “Swimming with the Northern Lights”. The fact that visitors to her studio reacted so emotionally to this work, and that it provoked conversation about polar bears and vanishing sea ice, inspired Christine to paint more bears.
Curious to observe the polar bear in its natural habitat, and to experience northern lights and the arctic landscape first hand, Christine journeyed to Iqaluit and Cape Dorset, Nunavut in 2014. And to learn more about polar bears, and the effect sea ice loss has on them, she travelled to the polar bear capital of the world, Churchill, Manitoba in Fall 2015.
The polar bear fully embraced as muse, Christine Montague Polar Bear Art was born. Her polar bear painting “Benediction” won an award at the 2015 Headwaters Arts This Changes Everything, a juried show about climate change.
Christine’s artwork is in the collection of McGill University, Peel Public School Board and EcoMetrix Inc., as well as in private collections in Canada, the U.S.A. Bermuda, and Great Britain
