Featured Artist Enda Bardell

Artist Enda Bardell’s impressive watercolor portfolio features stunning vistas imbued with a timeless quality. See more from this talented artist on her website.

 

 

My art career began way back, when we were refugees in Sweden after Soviet Union occupied our little country, Estonia. I began drawing at age eight or so. This was followed by designing clothes for paper dolls, which I created to give to girls at school in order to make friends.

 

 

My mom worked in a paper factory in Oskarshamn, where I had access to cardboard and paper for my creations. Perhaps that was also the beginning of my fabric art, clothing design and a brief stint as a costume designer in the Vancouver film industry!

 

 

When the Soviet Union demanded the return of the refugees, my family moved to Vancouver, Canada. I attended an inner-city school. My teacher noticed I had some talent and suggested I send a drawing of a family of dogs to an interschool art competition. I did, and won a book for the school library. I was now an artist at age twelve!

 

 

My art education was inconsistent. It ranged from various instructors, a short session at the former Vancouver School of Art (now ECUAD), studies with iconic Joan Balzar, friend and mentor of hard-edge painting, to a watercolor workshop with Toni Onley, Canada’s well known watercolor artist. Between family and various careers, I continued my art and studies off and on from landscapes in oil to hard edge abstracts in acrylics to fabric art and finally to watercolors, which I currently paint.

 

 

In 2010 I was invited to show two of my hard-edge paintings in the Estonian Art in Exile Exhibition. I am deeply honored to now have one of my works in the permanent collection at  KUMU, Tallinn, the National Gallery in the country of my birth. The other painting is in the permanent collection at Tartu Kunstimuuseum, Tartu, Estonia.

 

 

I am an adventurer in life as well as art! I paint what I love. From landscapes and skyscapes in watercolor, outdoors on location or from reference photos of places I have explored. I’m drawn to the wide-open spaces, sky, sea, mountains, and entangled forests, without any manmade subjects. The exception is freighters, with which I have a special bond in Vancouver where I swim at Point Grey Foreshore.

 

 

My world is alive and speaks to me in a visual voice. Painting fast and loose in watercolor enables me to connect with the moment of light. It allows the paint to perform its magic in its unpredictability, providing an opportunity to test endless possibilities!

 

 

My work is about the feeling of having been there and sharing the experience with the viewer—whether it be the magnitude of a setting sun, stormy sea, or a rock formation. To paint my interplay of the natural world is so rewarding!

 

Enda Bardell invites you to follow on Facebook and Instagram.

 

 

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