Terry Brynaert- still*life

Galerie St-Laurent + Hill presents:
Terry Brynaert
still*life
April 9 - 28
Vernissage: Saturday, April 11, 2:00 - 5:00pm
293 Dalhousie St, Ottawa, ON

Terry Brynaert - Artist Statement


Still*life is not a meditation on fruit bowls or porcelain vases; it proposes a dialogue between breath and silence, between the pulse of existence and the hush of its surroundings. These paintings have emerged from the experience of living surrounded by nature—a life steeped in forests, rivers, and the quiet choreography of seasons. They are offered as invitations to pause, to inhabit the stillness that nature offers without demanding, and to recognize that stillness is never empty; it hums with life.

From a distance, the works may appear akin to realism, as if reality itself were gently lifted from the forest floor and pinned to canvas. Yet, as the viewer approaches, the illusion fractures. What may have appeared serene reveals a riot of detail—brushstrokes that mimic the chaos of wind?tossed leaves, textures that echo the restless industry of bees buzzing about. This duality mirrors the experience of walking in the woods: the grandeur of treetops overhead, and, at your feet, a single ant bearing the improbable weight of a pine needle. Stillness, here, is not stasis; it is a layered complexity, a quiet teeming.

It is from this layered, breathing stillness of the natural world that the studio’s own quiet emerges. In the act of painting, thought slows to a near?motionless drift, settling into a trance?like, empty?headed calm. The studio becomes a kind of interior forest—silent, attentive, stripped of urgency—where gesture arises without strain and decisions surface from a place beneath language. This meditative quiet is not separate from nature but echoes it, becoming another form of listening.

Immersion in nature is not an escape but a return. Silence is not absence, but presence amplified. Each painting becomes a vessel for this paradox—where calm and vitality coexist, where the infinite and the infinitesimal converse in colour and form.

In still*life, the viewer is invited to slow down, to look twice, to surrender to the tension between order and disorder. These works are not so much representations; they are translations of experience, carrying the scent of pine, the flicker of shadow, the pulse of unseen lives. They strive to remind that stillness is not the opposite of life—it is its most profound articulation.


Galerie St-Laurent + Hill
293 Dalhousie Street
Ottawa, Canada
K1N 7E5