My Paintings Are Frequent Flyers: Selling Art Worldwide

Lately, I’ve come to a funny realization: my paintings may travel more than I do. I am selling Art worldwide.

I’ve spent much of my career travelling across Canada and beyond in search of landscapes, stories, people, and the visual details that eventually find their way onto my canvases. Travel has been an important part of my artistic practice, from Newfoundland to the Rocky Mountains and many places in between.

These days, I’m spending more time close to home on Vancouver Island, exploring the landscape I live in and painting the West Coast. My paintings, however, are still on the move.

Over the past couple years, paintings have left my studio and travelled to private collections in Ontario, Vancouver, Edmonton, Banff, Boston, California and even across the Atlantic to the United Kingdom. My work has also found homes in collections across Canada and the United States.

There is something wonderfully strange about knowing that a painting that began in my studio is now living somewhere I may never see. And that brings me to something collectors occasionally ask me about: how do I feel about selling a painting I really love? A collector once asked me, “Are there pieces you secretly hope will not sell so I can keep them?”

There are paintings that are particularly difficult to let go of. Perhaps they represent an important moment in my practice, a place I loved painting, or simply a painting that came together in a way that surprised even me.

I often think of my paintings as my children. My job is to raise them, nurture them, teach them everything I know, and bring them to a certain point. Then let them go. Once a painting leaves my studio, it begins a life of its own. It becomes part of someone else’s home, story, and collection. I may no longer see it every day, but I know it is out there somewhere, hopefully living a wonderful life beyond my gaze. And perhaps that is the greatest reward of selling a painting, I get to make another one.

Art Beyond The Studio: Selling Art Worldwide

The painting that leaves creates space for the next idea, the next story, the next experiment. The studio keeps moving forward, even as my paintings are travelling in directions of their own. I especially love receiving photographs from collectors showing me their new artwork installed in its home. It is a glimpse into a chapter of the painting’s life that I wasn’t there to witness.

So while I’m spending more time in my studio in Parksville, my paintings continue to be frequent flyers. They’re travelling highways and air routes, crossing borders and oceans, joining collections from coast to coast and beyond. I’m always curious about where they’ll go next. And, like any artist-parent, I hope they’re having a wonderful time out there.

Find a painting to love here.