Tamara Campbell — Art Lending of Ottawa

Tamara H. Campbell

Mixed Media

Canoeing in Georgian Bay

Afternoon Drinks on the Dock

Cosmic Hubba Bubba

Dance Like No One is Watching

Early Morning by the Bay

Dance Me into Outer Space

Escaping into a Candy Coated Dream

Lizzie Runs Free IV

Low Tide II

Mermaid Makeover

Morning after the Storm

Spring in Mermaid Marsh

Sauntering through the Faerie Wood on a Sunny Saturday Morning

The Wind is Everything

The Wind is Storming up the Bluffs

Artist Statement

Tamara is a mixed media impressionist and abstract artist. Her paintings are bold, colourful and full of details. She is inspired by nature with its abundance of colours, textures and forms; these details emerge through the many layers that build upon each other as she creates her paintings.

In her home studio outside of Burnstown, about an hour west of Ottawa, Tamara uses acrylic paints, mediums, inks, charcoal, pencils, and collage to create her paintings. She enjoys how each step of this process engages different thought processes and a variety of physical movements as she engages with the materials in a multitude of ways. The sizes, panel background colours and arrangements for the paintings are created and decided upon over the course of a few days or weeks. The part that takes the longest amount of time is deciding upon the combination and orientation of the strips for each painting – she says that it is like making a puzzle, but there is no reference picture. She arranges and rearranges the strips until the paintings come to life and decide how big they will be.

Tamara likes to work in collections. The main one that has captured her attention right now deals with creation, destruction and re-creation, involving the give and take of letting go of control and taking control through a number of different steps. She creates five large paintings using a chosen palette and photographs details from them. She then turns the paintings face down and cuts them into strips of varying widths. She cuts them from the back so that she can’t control where the cut lines will fall in the paintings – so she can’t get attached to any of the details that she admired and photographed earlier. The ninety or so resulting strips from the five paintings are then mixed together and reassembled into new, colourful assemblages. She call this series “The Purpose of Paper”.

Tamara has experimented with art since she was a child, and as an adult she has taken a wide variety of art courses. Her unique style blends playful creativity and experimentation with learned techniques. She has been showing her art on and off for many years, making it her full time focus since 2019. Her art is in private collections in Canada, Ecuador, New Zealand and the USA. She was the featured artist in The Humm in July 2023. In March 2024, Tamara won the People’s Choice Award at the West Carleton Art Society’s juried Spring Fling Art Show with her painting “Evening in the Mermaid Marshlands”.

Her life experiences, both wonderful and difficult, inform her perspective. She uses art as a means to search for peace, happiness and healing within herself. Tamara’s goal as an artist is to create art that provides a visual escape for her viewers – a place to get happily lost in the details.

She shares her creative process and art on her Instagram profile and Facebook art page. She is developing a website this year.

Instagram: tamara_h_campbell

Facebook: Tamara H Campbell Art

Website: www.tamarahcampbell.com