Taralee Guild

Taralee Guild (born 1984) grew up in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and is now based in Vancouver, British Columbia. She began painting at twelve, after inheriting her grandmother Ethel's paint box and easels, and self-taught her way into the medium from there. She earned a Diploma in Art from Victoria College of Art (2005) and a Visual Arts BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design (2010).

Guild works on several thematic series at once and is best known for two: Airstreams — hyper-realist paintings of mid-century aluminum trailers, where reflective metal interrupts realism with distortion that produces a quiet surrealist unease — and Nature's Cathedral, ethereal old-growth forest interiors based on photographs from Stanley Park in Vancouver and Cathedral Grove on Vancouver Island. The forest paintings reference Emily Carr and the Group of Seven, dematerialize through transparent color, and spiral into freehand abstraction that recalls West Coast First Nations design. By following photographs strictly, Guild says, she finds stranger imagery than she could invent.