Never easy, visiting the Arctic has become a bit of a trend among artists in recent years, but Muskoka-based painter, educator and world-traveller Pat Fairhead has been making pilgrimages to the ice-bounded region for the past twenty years, with nine expeditions to her credit. Although she has also journeyed in Namibia, the Amazon, Crete and many other places, no region holds greater allure for her than Canada’s northern precincts. During her eighth trip in 2007, she ventured as close to the Arctic Pole as you can get by ship. She has documented in her paintings heart-breakingly beautiful icebergs, but also receding glaciers and unprecedented expanses of open water. Now she feels called upon to bear personal witness to the astonishing escalation of negative changes wrought on the flora and fauna which sustain the life of northern residents.

Fairhead has a compelling story to tell about a landscape and a way of life in transition.

On a personal level she draws emotional sustenance from the land: “Islands and primal landscapes relate to my notion of myself as a solitary person,” says the artist. British-born, she grew up in Toronto where she was a precocious student at the Ontario College of Art under the tutelage of Franklin Carmichael of the Group of Seven. Subsequently she obtained her masters degree in art education, worked for TVOntario, taught painting and raised her daughter and son. Muskoka – the site of a beloved family cottage – was a summer constant and now she lives and works there year-round.  A portion of her work is based on the wonder she sees around her in her Muskoka home.

An in-demand lecturer on subjects such as painting, the Arctic and women in art, the charismatic artist with her distinctive curly strawberry-blonde hair and piercing blue eyes, makes an indelible impression. As a teacher, she is a respected art coach and an internationally renowned master of the demanding “wet-on-wet” watercolour technique by which paint is judiciously and swiftly applied to presoaked paper at which point gravity and surface tension take over. Pat has had 70 solo exhibitions in Canada and the United Stated and is represented in over 250 corporate collections.

With her new work of Arctic-inspired semi-abstracts Patricia Fairhead embarks on her new mission, namely to bear personal witness to the crisis of climate change in the North.