The Gallery at L.E. Shore is pleased to present Tanya Zaryski and Jerome Evola for our September 2026 exhibition.
These two artists met through their backyard tree line after a hefty snowfall in the middle of a Covid winter. Jerome had recently moved from Toronto with his family to a Clarksburg house that looked onto Tanya’s back gardens. That initial talk was brief, but art was discussed. They discovered they were both painters and a connection was made.
This is their first two-person exhibition together, showcasing their newest works. Tanya is focused on the natural world, creating detailed environments as settings for her portraits. Her paintings are lush and precise, personally narrative and full of fairytale magic. Jerome takes the long view, looking up to the clouds, studying their formations and capturing them in soft colours and expressive brush strokes. His landscapes are often distant, familiar views, and charged with emotion.
Exhibit Schedule
Opens: August 29, 2026
Grand Reception: August 29 | 2-4pm | All welcome!
Closes: September 30 at 2pm
The Gallery is a busy multi-use space and is often booked for private events and library and gallery programming. Drop ins are welcome during our open hours, but we encourage patrons to call 519-599-3681 before visiting to ensure The Gallery is available for walkthroughs.
Jerome Evola
More info coming soon!
Tanya Zaryski
This collection of paintings [in this exhibition] are the works that I always imagined I would pull out of myself, in my life as a maker of things. Despite having a decades long career as primarily a landscape painter, my heart has always longed to use painting as a vehicle to tell my own stories and create mythological visions from my own experiences. I remember reading Margaret Atwood’s “Cat’s Eye” in my last year of high school. The book is about the life of a painter. Her childhood was not mine, though there were things about it that rang familiar and true. Her time in art school, also not mine, though also not unimaginable. But her work was exactly the sort of work that I wanted to make. Drawing from personal narratives and larger archetypes. Imagery that calls to our half-remembered dreams and distorted flashes of childhood memory.
It’s always hard to know where the inspiration for paintings comes from. Where ideas are generated and what will trigger some breakthrough flash. It maybe begins with reading a novel that hit home as a not-quite-yet-adult. Since then I have gotten into and out of relationships, bought a farm, became a mother, sold the farm. Each event shaped the person I continue to become. An opportunity for reinvention came during the long weeks and months of Covid lockdowns. Missing my tiny handful of people intensely, I decided, in the long tradition of artists painting their friends, to undertake a series of portraits. Each piece becomes like a love letter, a gift, an act of seeing another person deeply. This gesture of painting a portrait requires a deep level of attention directed towards another. We don’t generally spend hundreds of hours staring intently at another, even between friends. It becomes uncomfortable if not unbearable. By working with photos (as we practiced social distancing) and creating half-imagined intimate landscapes for my subjects, I found myself able to dwell on them and hold them gently in all their beautiful, awkward human-ness and carry on imagined conversations with them as I painted late into the nights.
