Arts and Entertainment

Local artist’s sky paintings featured at Maggiolly’s show window

March 13, 2025   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

Dufferin County artist Gita Karklins’ Sky Series is currently on display in Maggiolly’s show window at 158 Broadway. The artist has an unusual take on what one might see overhead, with a singular sense of humour that is delightful.

In her Ascension Series, there are male figurines, a ceramic apricot poodle, and a ceramic leopard, all independently “ascending.”

She sat down with the Citizen this week to talk about her lifelong love of painting and her approach, as to who and what she wants to put in them.

She told us, “I started with photography at Sheridan. I loved the Group of Seven, but I couldn’t get a grip on it.”

Karklins explained her painting style is consistent but the subject matter changes. Now she is doing her Sky Series, saying, “You know when it’s right; you keep staring at this and thinking, ‘that’s a song and it’s not right.’”

Painting is her passion, that and her dog, Freda, who came to her via a difficult path. Freda was a street dog in Houston, as Karklins told the tale, rescued by a shelter there. A rescue team brought her up to Canada and put the dog in foster care when Karklins heard about her and brought her home.

“We’re both lucky to have finally come together,” she said. 

They travel and camp together during the warm seasons, having camped in Jasper Park and last year, they went to Newfoundland. Summer is coming for her and Freda’s mid-week camping trips and Karklins is getting excited about those plans.

Born in Niagara Falls, Karklins left Chippewa in her 20s and now lives in her country home in Mansfield. Karklins bought that house over 20 years ago, enjoying the privacy of her one-acre property with her partner, Andy. There is always work to do on her house.

Meanwhile, she is keeping her eye on the sky, taking photos and recently trying to include painted trees at the bottom of the sky pictures although she doesn’t do landscape painting. Her sky paintings are exactly that – a collection of clouds owning their canvases just as they are: their stories about the weather or a coming storm; time to reflect on what is happening on the earth below. Like the reality, the cloud paintings are mesmerizing and beautiful.

While Karklins loves doing people, those paintings become portraits, she thinks, whereas “dolls are a way of making the people without making portraits.

“I have been devoted to life drawing and I have improved my drawing ability really well,” she commented, adding, “The odd thing is, I can paint a person but putting clothes on them is hard.”

As an artist, Karklins has been to galleries in London, England and Paris, France, and goes to the McMichael, Canadian Art Collection Gallery.

Karklins purposefully does not have a lawn; her acre is all flowers. One year, In the Hills Magazine wrote about her uncut lawn and five others in the region to encourage more people to let nature take its course and invite the bees to visit. For Karklins, geraniums are blooming in the summer and “the bees just love it.” 

Her ambition is to have a commercial agent working for her. Showing at Headwaters Arts, and doing the juried shows there and elsewhere has won her an award in a juried show in a commercial gallery. Karklins’ work is hung in the Gallery Lagom in Creemore.

“They have tremendous shows of things that are different.” she told us, saying that she does not do much online selling.

The current paintings that she is doing are small, 24×12 inches, and she is making frames to put them on the wall.

“They can look better on the wall,” she remarked. 

Over the last little while, Karklins had a one-woman show in Barrie and participated in solo shows she found to be important, mentioning the tremendous competition in the art world; noting, “people love abstract too.”

Of environmental issues, she said, “I do some paintings that show something is happening. When I was camping in Jasper, the fires happened next winter. Remembering Jasper and the fires since – how can we pretend this is not happening?

Her sky paintings are not obvious yet they are forbidding with this cloud coming over.

“I want to go easy on that too. Some are ominous,” Karklins said.

“I think it’s good to make a statement.”

To view her Sky Series, go to her website gitakarklins.com/bio-and-cv.

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