Biography

Debra Tate-Sears is a traditional landscape artist with a penchant for weaving a story into her paintings, and has a unique, self taught approach to the watercolour medium.  She uses a limited palette, variations on the primary colours, and starts her paintings with pale washes, and build upon transparent layers to a desired intensity and detail by isolating and defining underlying washes through the use of negative space.  No tricks - no masking out, no "Chinese White" or body colour, nothing but pure transparent watercolour and an obsessive attention to detail!

Debra has a fascination with light, and the interpretation of light in a transparent medium to create setting and determine atmosphere, and although she considers herself an adept watercolour technician who uses a precise, analytical examination of the components of landscape elements, she hopes the immediate response to her work is perceived as more "painterly" than contrived.

She grew up in a small village in South Eastern Ontario, and this sense of belonging in a close-knit agriculture oriented community, combined with the study of Art History at Carleton University in Ottawa, lead to a unique interpretation of the pastoral, the rural subject matter, the fundamentals of the "Romantic" landscape, and the traditional British approach to watercolours.

During the past year, Debra has been moving away from the traditional “pastoral”, and has been exploring the laneways of older Ontario lakeshore towns and cities where the last vestiges of Victorian Affluence still exist. This sense of place, of belonging, can be found in the unique architectural styles that combine British High Victorian, French Canadian, and the predominance of limestone as a readily available building material, that have created something uniquely Canadian. Debra uses these recognizable architectural forms to create “Romantic” compositions building structural elements up to an “apex”, framed by light, and crowned by secondary elements. The result is a composition that is brooding, forbidding, and at the same time, strangely inviting.

Debra's Influences and "Muses":
The topography of Southern Ontario: Northumberland, Victoria and Hastings Counties, Prince Edward County and the "Stone Mills" regions surrounding Kingston, the Limestone City.
British Watercolour Painters - Thomas Girtin, John Sell Cotman, John Constable.
Romanticism - Caspar David Friedrich (German Romantic)
Canadian Watercolour Painter - Thomas Mower Martin