Artist Q & A: Sheri Paisley

For her new solo exhibition Kennedy River Rest, Vancouver Island based artist Sheri Paisley discusses the nature of in-between places, her approach to making unseen forces visible, and, for her, the increasingly blurred line between engaging in her artistic practice and simply living life.

Kennedy River Rest opens at Bau-Xi Vancouver on October 17 and runs through November 1, 2026.

Sheri Paisley, A Wild and Specific Trail. Oil on canvas, 36 x 66 inches.

1. The title Kennedy River Rest points to a very particular, almost ordinary place - a rest area rather than a destination. What was it about that particular stop along Highway 4 that made you want to stay with it, photograph it, and ultimately build a body of work around it?

I don't really know. I stopped there.
I think that's part of it. It wasn't somewhere I had gone to see something. It was just a place to pull over. A place to get out of the truck, stretch my legs there for a few minutes, maybe hike down and look at the river, then return to the vehicle and keep going.
This place stayed with me. The sound of the river pulled me through a wall of trees to it's edge. 
I started photographing it from different angles, looking in different directions. The more I photographed it, the less it seemed like I was trying to document a physical place. 
I was visually collecting variations of feeling.
I like that the word rest is in the title. It isn't a destination. It's a pause. You stop there to rest for a while on your way to somewhere else.
That interests me.



Sheri Paisley, Rain Light. Oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches.


2. Do you think there is a different kind of attention that becomes possible when you are temporarily between destinations?

I’m not sure. 
It seems like going somewhere specific usually involves planning or expecting something, which maybe seems related to attention. 
Pulling over along the way, even for a few minutes, seems to relate more to a noticing than it does to attention. It creates something kind of like a chord change or flow disruption gap, a return to present moment where the projection of future focus is temporarily suspended. 
The noticing: the way an expansion of light streams through trees or how it makes water appear to be a fluid dispersement in sparkles of light. Water, while traveling, and its many layers of dense and particular sound. Wind shuffling through a tree. Things that, for some reason, stand out in a way they wouldn’t have otherwise in a future focused state or if in a hurry. 
I'm interested in that. It’s not profound. I think it's just what happens when you stop trying to get somewhere else. 
Rest relates to that and I think the process of painting is also like that.

Sheri Paisley, Memory of There and Here. Oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches.


3. Due to your condition of Aphantasia, you have said you photograph a place from multiple perspectives in order to use those images to create your paintings. What happens in the studio when these different images begin to coexist in one work?

I can't hold any imagery in my minds-eye so if I leave somewhere, I don't carry a mental picture of it with me and I can’t recall it in my minds-eye either. Photo-documenting helps. 
I want to have enough photo-doccumented images of a place so that I can map the visual feeling of an area and come back to it and piece them together in a painting like an emotional collage in time. 
Each photo offers something different from the other and using multiple images to make each painting creates a feeling in motion. John Bradshaw wrote about how feelings (or e-motion) was just energy in motion and that’s something I think about too. 
This is the part I like. There is a parallel unfolding process inside "The Creative Act," as Rick Rubin calls it.
Eventually the painting becomes a visually layered feeling space I couldn't have photographed.



Sheri Paisley, Stoic Anomaly. Oil on canvas, 40 x 40 inches.


4. Your works utilize the elements of breath, wind and unseen forces to otherworldly effect, capturing the feeling of the West Coast without representing specific forms or scenes: the works hold a tension between solidity and dispersal, land and atmosphere, and form and formlessness. Can you talk about the genesis of your technique for making these forces visible in your paintings?

I'm not sure if I have a technique for making these things visible. I think I'm trying to paint my perception of what it might feel like to be whatever this is. 
What would it feel like to be the wind; the atmosphere in motion? Is it visually possible to create the feeling of expansion and dispersal beyond the self? 
I work in many layers. I think that's where the internal workings of the paintings begin to live and interconnect with each other, between layers, and almost (hopefully) create a kind of heart beat or motion of breath.
I'm not trying to make a picture of wind. I'm trying to create a space and conditions where the painting might have a subtle opportunity to breathe a bit like wind. So that when the image is seen it might function internally within the viewer as an experience of that. 



Sheri Paisley, An Orchestra of River. Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches.


5. You say that painting has become “a way of being in the world.” That feels larger than describing painting as a profession or even a creative practice. What does it mean to you as a way of being?

I think it means I don't really know how to separate painting from living outside the studio anymore.
I often think of the painting process as a lot like being underwater. I feel like that in life outside the studio, too. Most people seem to think a lot faster than I do which can be pretty challenging especially when that slowness is interpreted as something else. I think my brain, like a lot of other committed painters, is just set to this mode. Life is dedicated to painting and all other settings have been overridden by this mode of thinking. 
Painting has become a way of being in the world. Without it, I'm not sure how life experience is fully processed.



Sheri Paisley, A Safe Place to Remember. Oil on canvas, 60 x 66 inches.

6. You recently received the 2026 Takao Tanabe Prize as the mid-career artist recipient. Tanabe's contemplative approach to landscape has been an influence on your understanding of painting. Has receiving an award connected to that lineage changed how you think about your own relationship to landscape painting?

Yes and also no. 
It has changed the way I think about my own relationship to landscape painting because I've spent years doing something and having  vague idea of where it fits, then somebody puts your work beside really meaningful work and says, this belongs here.
Mr. Tanabe's work has been important to me for a long time. I love the quietness in his work. He doesn't seem to be trying to make the landscape perform. He lets it be there. I love this so much. 
So receiving the prize made me think about how long I've been looking at these same things: light, weather, water, distance, atmosphere. I hadn't necessarily thought of that as a lineage while I was doing it. It was just what I was interested in.
I don't think the award changes why I paint.
If anything, it makes me want to keep going.
I'm still trying to figure it out. And what a great gift that is.



The artist at work at the Kennedy River Rest Stop, Vancouver Island, 2026.