About

Emilia Perri has been an artist all her life. After her Honours Graduation from the Ontario College of Art in 1984, where she was awarded the 4th year W.O. Forseyth Award for Excellence in Painting, Emilia spent ten years painting expressive and semi-abstract oil portraits.

Since 1995, Emilia has switched to a more expressive medium; high quality fluid and high flow acrylics, which she continues to use today to create large abstract paintings. These paintings are luscious, colourful depictions of emotional responses to the grandeur of nature and the relationship we have with it and each other. Her inspirational travels include many trips to Manitoulin Island, a natural and inspirational painting area for her for many years, as well as travels to Europe, where she became fascinated by crumbling walls and buildings, and the textures and tapestries of human life that are left behind by them. Emilia has explored the battle and balance between man and nature in her work, using a multitude of layers of transparent paints that are scraped, dripped, blended, smoothed, exposed and concealed, eventually arriving at a harmony that is unique to each work. Much like life, she retains various glimpses to show the myriad of experiences that we all go through, which in the end form and connect us to each other.

Recently Emilia was the recipient of the Reed T. Cooper Bursary in Visual Arts for 2016. This award allowed her to travel to the Yukon during the summer of 2016, where she immersed herself in wild nature via paddling a canoe on the Yukon River for 375 kilometers. This has inspired her new large abstracts, and instilled in her the inspiration to explore many new possibilities.

Originally from Toronto, Emilia has called Hockley Valley her home since 1990, where she has always been a very prolific painter. She has 3 children who are also all artists in film, music, and visual art. Because of all the art in her life, she has been blessed with a very rich life.